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Reading an article on CNET about a deal on a Blu-ray player on Sears the author and the end of the post added an update that indicated a better deal on some other website but the deal was, and I quote “today only”. That made me think about when today is, and what will happen down the road when people read the same article.

I started over-analyzing the issue by locating the date, the date on the CNET site is located above the article giving you a clear view of when the article was published. The author’s update was at the bottom of the page, which if you are like me, I only skim over sites looking for what I think is important. I try to think like someone that is no too very tech savvy and the “today only” remark should have been accompanied by the current date of the post in this case.

Personally, I try not to make this mistake when writing articles for my blog, I always keep in mind that while I’m writing about an article today (November 17, 2008) that doesn’t mean that you, the reader, is reading this the day it was published. My website has the date in the header, that is the current date, and then I include (my WordPress theme by default) the date of the article in the article’s footer.

On top of these dates, I make sure that if I need to reference a specific time within the post, I include the date as I expect the reader to understand it. This gives me certain peace of mind, I’m just making sure that my space-and-time talk makes sense to the reader without actually worrying when my readers are actually reading one of my articles.

You can travel around the web and if you do it as often as I do, you start noticing how important dates are. If you are a blogger, how important are dates for you? Would you omit the date in your post for a specific purpose? And if yes, why? The same goes for my readers, how important is the date for your when reading stuff around the web?

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