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Legacy or historical blog | timestamp issue

  1. howesound
    Member

    As part of the run-up to the 20th anniversary of a local institution, some of us would like to establish a blog for all of us who participate.

    We envision posts that record what happened during the 20-year history. The concept is that these articles would be written in the present tense, and posted on the relevant date when the story and images were current.

    This means that the blog would have entries posted as early as 1988 - which predates the World Wide Web, and even the public use of the Internet.

    So, a couple of questions:
    1. Would the wordpress.com software allow/support this range of dates?
    2. Would the search engines respond to the pings, crawl, and make searchable those posts with those strange dates.

    Yes, the plan is that the blog will continue into the future. At the same time it would have this wonderful and colourful legacy of articles about the people and events.

    Thanks

  2. thesacredpath
    Member

    You can certainly change the timestamp when you publish a post, but I'm not sure if there are any limits.

    One possible solution would be to include the date you want in the title of the post and then post them in order so that they will appear chronologically.

  3. mark
    Support

    Your dates should be good.

    Dates before Jan 1, 1970 give problems. Editing the timestamp to dates after that should be okay.

  4. howesound
    Member

    Thanks mark and thesacredpath. I needed to know that before we energized a host of volunteers to dig through records, contact vanished people, find and scan pictures and negs (lots of this is before digital cameras), and more. Knowing that going back to the 80s will work allows us to begin to develop some strategy.

    Now, about question #2? It is my experience that the search engines are very friendly to blogs, and expecially with wordpress.com, I know that Google usually crawls a page within a day of my posting. I suspect that this is because the folks who write the search algorithms have decided that blogs contain real content (it would be hard for a spammer to create a thousand specious blogs). So, with those legacy posts, I'd like some comfort that the names of people who contributed and have moved on would be searchable. We hope it will unite us with some of those folks. (Hey, everyone googles their own name).

  5. judyb12
    Member

    i don't see why search engines wouldn't crawl posts just because of the datestamps. You could try putting up a test post from 1987 and see if it shows up after a couple of days.

  6. millaq
    Member

    I love your idea, howesound! Sounds really fun playing with time like that! :-)

  7. howesound
    Member

    Thanks judyb12, I think that exactly what we will try. Good idea.

    Millaq, we'd be doing this to establish the history and remember the people. The blog will be as archival as wordpress.com itself. Let's hope that the wp gang are in for the long haul. I sincerely hope they will not be tempted, like those folks at flickr, to sell out to Yahoo or Microsoft. And that our precious blogs will still be here 100 years from now. And yes, after all of the work is done, I think it will be fun.

  8. wank
    Member

    I very much doubt that anything on the internet will still be here 100 years from now :) Don't forget to make regular backups.

  9. howesound
    Member

    The test post that Judyb12 suggested is here: http://howesound.wordpress.com/1998/09/04/an-experiment-in-time-travel/#comment-2319

    WordPress.com presents no problems. I lost the file in ecto (my blogging software), but the author explained why and what to do about it. The details are in the comment to the article.

    Wank, my computer didn't come with a backup button. What's that about? In 100 years I am hoping that everything will be on whatever the Internet has become. Right now I'd like enough bandwidth to run 4 Hi Def television signals (real hi def) at once.

  10. howesound
    Member

    The test post is now here: http://howesound.wordpress.com/1988/09/04/an-experiment-in-time-travel/

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