When Did Date-Stamping Your Work Suddenly Become Unfashionable?

Who?, Why?, What?, Where?, WHEN? The cornerstones of all journalistic endeavor.

Let me just highlight that last one again…

WHEN!!!!!

So, why recently has it become fashionable, in WordPress templates in particular, to drop the date from posts?

It should be THE ‘Golden Number One’ piece of metadata for every post, and displayed in big characters at the top of each post.

It’s not just WordPress. When I adopted my own new Joomla! template last summer I was horrified to discover that Yootheme (they are fantastic designers across both WP and Joomla!) hadn’t included an option to display the ‘published date’ for a post, as opposed to the ‘created date’ in my template. Now, in order to properly date stamp my posts (unless I am going straight to press), I have to spoof the created date!

Every – I’m not talking “mostly” – EVERY time I read a post or a news headline that is interesting, my very first thought is “when was this written?”

It is fundamental.

“Is this new thing, this event, this research, this statistic, this thought, this rant, this product, this survey, this essay, this photo…. ‘new’ today?”

…Or am I looking at something that was written last week? Or in 2009?

Yesterday I read a very interesting post (Nothing to do with this subject but seriously worth reading) that took me 30 secs of forensic work to nail down as having been written on or about the 7th December (that’s when the first comments were posted). FFS!

You want more examples?

Good post from Paul Dow. I even gave it a Google+. I’m not sure how frequently Paul posts so I’m just assuming it was written yesterday and not on New Year’s Eve. The “Navel Gazing” reference in the title picks up on a post by Tnooz before Christmas, so who knows! (No comments to use forensically at time of writing)

Ayngelina posts regularly so it’s not hard to guess that this was written recently – on or about Jan 9 if those commenting were quick off the mark.

I knew that this Copyblogger post was written today because Google Reader told me it was…. but the post itself doesn’t.

This post by Andrew Eames (BGTW member. Should know better!) seems to have a long shelf-life which is just as well since anyone stumbling across it in five years time will probably assume it is new.

It’s just as well that Nellie’s SEF plugin inserts the date in the path of the URL for this post so that we know it was written either on 6 Feb or 2 June in 2009, and not even the comments can help us here. The first was posted “136 weeks ago”. You do the math.

(Sorry to ‘out’ you guys, but you’re so not alone! There are loads of examples. I just happened to find yours first when looking for some to back up my argument. )

This has been a bugbear of mine for a long time (notice the DATE of the post), but back then it applied to PRs who didn’t date their press releases (a mortal sin!). I can’t believe that now writers are not dating their material.

I suspect that it is a triumph of programmers, who are not bothered because the computer knows when it was written (it’s in the RSS/XML enclosure), over designers who should be looking at human interaction.

Have you noticed this trend? Do you think it is important? Or am I just having a rant by myself?

Image: Plinkk