Identifying Old Blog Entries

Published: {ts '2012-09-01 00:00:00'}
Author: Steven Neiland
Site Url: http://www.neiland.net/article/identifying-old-blog-entries/

Its hard for me to imagine how quickly the time has gone, but this blog turned 2 years old today. So to mark the occasion I'm rolling out a new feature.

Identifying Old Blog Entries

One of my pet peeves with some blogs is how they don't identify when a particular entry was published. This can mislead readers into following out of date information which is possibly/probably no longer correct. As you can see I date stamp all my blog entries, however it is still possible to improve on this.

A few months ago I was searching for information about better ways for styling html tables when I came across this blog entry. While I did not agree with the content of the post I did find something valuable in the way it was displayed. In addition to displaying the published date, the blog also displayed a large warning box at the start of the entry alerting the reader that this was an old entry that may not be correct anymore.

I liked this approach so much that I coded it into my own blog and today marks the first day that an entry is old enough to trigger it. To demonstrate here is a link my first blog post complete with the new alert.

I hope other bloggers take this idea and run with it as I think every blog should make a habit of providing this kind of meta data to users.