Tech Blogs - Lack of time reference when reading articles
Mag748
Posts: 266
Hello,
I've been reading blogs and tech related articles for a good part of my life. Back in the day, whenever something was posted to the internet, it prominently had a posting date presented clearly at the top or bottom of the article. This made it very easy to tell if the thing you were reading was going to be helpful or not, particularly if you were viewing multiple articles found in a Google search.
Now a-days, it seems either very difficult to find the posting date of an article that's been posted to a site with a "modern" or "minimalist" theme. Sometimes its simply no where to be found and the only way to tell if the page has ever been updated is the copyright date at the footer. This is terribly frustrating to me.
I'm always looking for the most up-to-date information on a topic, and it's getting harder to do that. Especially on hot topics that are changing on a day to day, or even hourly basis.
End rant, thanks,
Marcus.
I've been reading blogs and tech related articles for a good part of my life. Back in the day, whenever something was posted to the internet, it prominently had a posting date presented clearly at the top or bottom of the article. This made it very easy to tell if the thing you were reading was going to be helpful or not, particularly if you were viewing multiple articles found in a Google search.
Now a-days, it seems either very difficult to find the posting date of an article that's been posted to a site with a "modern" or "minimalist" theme. Sometimes its simply no where to be found and the only way to tell if the page has ever been updated is the copyright date at the footer. This is terribly frustrating to me.
I'm always looking for the most up-to-date information on a topic, and it's getting harder to do that. Especially on hot topics that are changing on a day to day, or even hourly basis.
End rant, thanks,
Marcus.
Comments
So, when you don't see it, it's likely intentional. Some blogs do it because they don't post regularly, and they want to cover up that fact. Those that post regularly might be wanting to leverage the content for advertising reasons. Old news goes further when it's undated. And others don't feel their content would be considered timely, and WordPress is simply used as a CMS platform. The date of the posting is irrelevent, because it's not "news."
If the site has an RSS feed, the feed data often includes the posting date, even if the blog theme hides it. You might try an RSS reader and set it to display only current posts. If you find the blog via Google, you can set the search options to ignore old stuff. That works as long as the post doesn't also have recent comments. Each time someone adds a comment, it updates the page, so Google and Bing think it's more current than it really is.
Relying on the copyright date doesn't really work because it's common in modern themes to use a PHP function to return the current year. It's not hard-coded.
It's especially annoying when it's a technical description of how to do A with B and you have no idea what century it's from or the versions of A and B.
Seems we will eventually drown in the exponentially growing swamp of this useless information.
Thank God for stackoverflow.com
So, from about 1994 and counting. With sites like FishCam we should have known what was coming.
That said, about a year later it got a little better, if only briefly -- that's when my first site went live!
Luckily there always seems to be ways arising to filter out the noise.
Thanks for your tips. I guess part of the problem is that I haven't updated my googling techniques in a long time. I need to account for the fact that literally ever source of information presented on the internet is there only to get your clicks. That's the real frustrating thing.
On the topic of noise filtering, sometime that is just impossible. I.E., actually buying an episode of a TV show and still find ads presented before and after the actual show. And paying for a streaming music service and still receiving ads between every other song. It's inescapable.
Thanks,
Marcus