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metadata whatever

I've been thinking about how a technical blog should be structured.

When I was growing up, websites were clearly the work of one person or a small group. They were bespooke and seemed really solid and permanent. I think part of this was that there weren't dates and timestamps on everything. Because after the invention of blogging, all information now feels ephemeral. It has dates, etc, but do we need them? Maybe, maybe not.

Things I use metadata on technical blog posts for:

  • figuring out if the information is still relevant (but knowing a version of the software would be more helpful for that. It's for 1.x.x and the latest is 5.x.x? Maybe look elsewhere. Dates are an OK approximation of this but since major versions can sometimes bump up really quickly it's helpful to know either/both.)
  • I want to know who published the article to establish credibility. If someone's willing to put their name on an article I feel they're more trustworthy than someone who's not (cough cough, this site doesn't have my name on the posts but that's an oversight, not intentional.)

So maybe instead of published date and author I wanted last-reviewed or last-updated date along with page-specific metadata.

But also, I don't want the pages to be presented in chronological order (but maybe last-updated order would be helpful?) Instead, I want pages to interlink among each other. Backlinks would be especially helpful here!

I guess I'm kind of describing a documentation site or a zettelkasten more than I am a blog, at this point.

But I also think that ephemeral or time-bound posts have their place. I'll be speaking on X at conference Y, I've just released package Z, etc.

So I wonder about:

  • a "stuff" archive which is linked among pages, maybe with an index or breadcrumbs or backlinks or something. Maybe this has chronological reviewed-at or updated-at stuff? Could be cool to have a diff or commit messages.
  • a "time" archive which is ordered by publish date. "Blog post"s go here.

I'm not sure if techniques vs pure knowledge needs to be split separately, or if each note needs to be as small as possible, etc.

But what I have now is:

  • posts sorted chronologically
  • talks sorted chronologically