
Open letter to all developers with blogs - thisguyrob
Please add timestamps to your posts!<p>Thanks, 
thisguyrob
======
pixelbath
I would also add:

No screenshots of code. I don't care if it's not syntax-highlighted, but I
would like it to be in plain text, hopefully fixed-width.

If you're going to reference another blog, please _include the relevant
information_ in your own blog before the linked site goes down and I have to
hope that site's owner didn't block archive.org from indexing it.

I'd like comments enabled, but I know some people have a hard-line stance
against it (I was once told, "oh, you're thinking of a forum" when I suggested
a developer add comments to their blog). Sometimes people smarter than me
comment on my blog, and that adds value to my post when it has incomplete or
incorrect information.

~~~
gist
> No screenshots of code.

Not that I disagree but isn't there a security risk with code that can be cut
and pasted?

~~~
mixedCase
> Not that I disagree but isn't there a security risk with code that can be
> cut and pasted?

Yes if the blog author is malicious and the copy-paster inattentive. Don't
even need an inattentive user if it's a command pasted in a terminal that will
interpret the newline as <enter>.

------
billconan
If you guys want to try a new blogging experience, I recommend Epiphany:

[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2af8c797c6ad9a66181026ee4bd3806b6f211)

Epiphany is a crossover of Jupyter notebook and Medium.com,

Not only can you write text, you can also program on it, to create interactive
examples, see:

[https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=4c411b8a0b5207739f97e787d2af...](https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=4c411b8a0b5207739f97e787d2af77ec9e1a1a47f117eb946ba1fcf51865d5f6)

In addition to interactivity, Epiphany implements version control, forking and
pull request. You can collaborate with others just like you do on github.

An article will have two timestamps, Create time and last modified time. More
than that, you can see the entire revision history.

Source code is in text and syntax highlighted.

It also has the social publishing feature as seen on Medium.

Finally, users own their content. Epiphany has a download button to allow
downloading all blog data.

The format used by Epiphany, unlike that of Jupyter, is in plain text and is
human readable.

disclaimer: I made Epiphany

~~~
seisvelas
I just signed up, this is exactly the kind of platform I've been wanting.
Thanks!

~~~
billconan
thank you! It’s still new and has bugs. Let me know your experience and any
issues. I will fix ASAP!

~~~
seisvelas
Sure! In the little tour it gives you, when it's describing the play button, I
couldn't click Next or Finish because they were hidden behind the little tag
input area. I just zoomed out on the page with CTRL + minus and was able to
click.

I imagine you didn't notice this due to it being specific to my screen size
(I'm on a macbook, I'm guessing you're using something else?)

~~~
billconan
Thank you for the feedback. Yes, the tour isn't perfect. I'm using a library
called vuetour. I don't like it and am about to replace it.

I will resolve the issue this weekend.

~~~
seisvelas
You're welcome! I'm enjoying the site quite a bit, it's gorgeous.

I don't think the GitHub for the project is updated but from now on when I
notice things I'll raise them as issues there :)

------
sixplusone
In iso8601, so I don't have to figure out where you live and which format that
country uses.

Also, not just blogs but everything ever posted online.

------
theandrewbailey
I think that goes for everyone with a blog. And make sure that those dates
have years! I've lost count of how many blogs only show the month and day of a
post. "Mar 3" of 2019? Or is that 2009? I can't tell!

------
dredmorbius
Absolute, not relative.

"17 minutes ago."

~~~
jolmg
One of my pet peeves with HN. Eventually, every post ends up as "X years ago".
I wish I knew when in that year.

~~~
capableweb
Hm, HN seems to show the exact year for me, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-10-08](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-10-08)
and this submission
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18169243)

Or the top voted story on Oct 8, 2007
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795)

~~~
jolmg
You're right. The issue is with months. Once it gets to a year, HN shows the
date. It's not as bad as I mistakenly recalled/extrapolated.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I'm pretty sure it used to just show eg "3 years ago". I was surprised to read
the exact date in the above.

Created used to show the number of days (I remember passing 3650), and now it
shows the date. So the change was within the last year.

~~~
jolmg
Thank you for giving me hope in my memory. Checking the Wayback Machine, it
seems that putting absolute dates was a change that came some time after 2017.
In 2017, HN post id=1 was dated "4027 days ago"[1].

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171019104348/https://news.ycom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171019104348/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1)

------
jerriep
Toptal is a big offender with this. I asked them before to do this and they
declined. I understand there are some evergreen content out there, but
anything related to technology does not fall into that category and having a
date is important to understand if the content is likely out of date.

------
CM30
I suspect a fair few of the people who do this are trying to trick search
engines into thinking their content was posted more recently than it actually
was, since a few SEOs did experiments and found content without
timestamps/with misleading ones would sometimes rank higher than those with
accurate ones.

That or they think it gets people thinking they post more regularly than they
actually do.

But yeah, agreed. Especially given that software development is a rather time
sensitive field, and what works/happens to be best practice at one point may
not be so further down the line.

------
ahbyb
If it's a wordpress blog, append /feed/ to the post url and the timestamp will
be in the channel->item->pubDate field.

Ex: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/10/04/breaking-down-
this-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/10/04/breaking-down-this-weeks-
net-neutrality-court-decision/feed/)

------
idoescompooters
Apparently Facebook does not like blogs/vlogs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pIJoPkh9IU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pIJoPkh9IU)

------
tomaszs
Oh i wrote last blog post 10 years ago? So sad. Swoosh. Evergreen enabled :)
Ps. Techcically speaking a set of articles without timestamps is not a blog

------
bonyt
Is this as opposed to just having date stamps? That’s what I have on mine. Is
there any reason the time of a post is particularly relevant?

~~~
dredmorbius
Date or time, same thing.

A timestamp is useful for rapidly-cycling content, especially comment threads.
If you're posting content less often than daily, a date stamp is sufficient,
though if your site has multiple posts daily, go with timestamps.

"Sufficient granularity to distinguish content" should be your guiding
principle.

------
duxup
Also n00bs like me... just don't offer code specific instruction about coding
on your blog. Personal experiences, learning advice have at it, but if you
really haven't done much coding.... please don't offer advice about it.

I hate to be so negative but the internet is awash with bad coding advice (and
the same code copied from vid to blog and back again) that seems like resume
fodder more than helpful.

The worst thing about learning is reading a post long enough to realize the
other person is a noob too and their code is a malformed mess that the blog
author doesn't really understand.

~~~
amerkhalid
I have to disagree, I have learned from a lot of n00bs. I copied broken code
and it didn't work, but it provided enough hints that I was able to make it
work. I also posted back fixed code as comments on authors' blogs, and many
would update their post with my code.

Same thing has happened on my blog, I have some super old Pentaho
configuration posts, and every once in a while I get an email from someone
saying my code is not right but they were able to make it work with some
changes. Hence, I leave it up there.

