On Post Timestamps

Just saw the timestamp of a couple of photo posts that I thought were off by a few hours. I went to change them, thinking it was something like a timezone bug, but then remembered that I made the post a few hours after I took the photo. I wonder if having the option to set the post timestamp to the photo would be a good idea, something akin to how Day One works. Of course, the issue would be that the post would be a few hours old when published, making it unlikely to appear in chronological timelines.

I sometimes wonder if it’s better that blog posts have two timestamps: one for when the post was published, and one for when the event occurred. That way, the post will still appear in chronological feeds while being about events that happened hours, days, or even years in the past. Maybe they can show up in chronological order within the category feed.

But that might complicate things a little. Much of our existing blogging infrastructure assumes a single timestamp, and while it would be nice to occasionally encode a separate date for a specific event, it’s probably not going to be needed that often. When would the event date for this post be, for example? When I started writing the post?

Maybe a nice compromise would be to allow the change in timestamp, but only if the image is recent, say 4 hours. That way, it’ll still be sort of realtime in the various chronological feeds, yet the date of the post would be closer to the event after that. Once the post drops off the feed, the published time looses it’s relevance and knowing when the event actually occurred would be more important for posterity reasons.

Or maybe I’m just over thinking the whole thing.