Have you ever searched the web for an article where you couldn’t see when it was published? It happens to me quite often. I don’t understand why such important information isn’t communicated to the readers.

In a fast-moving numeric world, the publishing date helps the reader gauge the content’s relevancy. I set the publication date on all my websites because it adds context to the content. When I created Numeric Citizen I/O, I used a post slug format that includes the publication date. The path to the webpage is shown in search results, which makes searching the web a more useful experience. Below are examples of URLs to my websites.

https://numericcitizen.micro.blog/2021/03/07/about-those-webp.html

https://numericcitizen.me/2021/02/27/porting-office-work-a-bad-idea/

Update 2022-11-15: Sadly, since moving to a Craft-based hosting solution, the URL can no longer include the publication date. If you are a business plan subscriber, the workaround is to set the document as a separate website individually.

Update 2024-03-15: I realized that when I moved from WordPress to Ghost, I lost this notion of date in the URL. All previous content is still accessible using the old URL format, but newly published content no longer contains the publication date in the article’s URL. We cannot have it all, I guess.

This article was first published on 2021-03-17.