Overthinking Dates

⚠️ Attention conservation notice: I'm just spinning my wheels here trying to figure out my preferred date format for blog posts. Your time would be better spent reading anything else or, like, sorting out your calendar.

Recently, I re-did the way that my Hugo theme displays blog posts and notes. Both types of posts were being sorted chronologically by last date of modification which meant that the blog posts were all scrambled. This led to a bunch of minor fixes around here. I realized that the list view was a bit hard to parse visually, and decided to steal an idea from Jeff Kaufman and visually style the lists a bit. For the sake of reference, here is what the list view looks like right now at the time of writing¹.

For some reason, I don’t like the dates in the right hand column despite the fact that I put them there. They’re just a bunch of numbers like 2026-10-13. They feel too much like data. One doesn’t see this sort of thing in a book. If the list view is a table of contents then listing the dates at this level of detail is just weird.

And yet, the dates do convey meaningful information. It is helpful online to know how old a page is. I’m interested to know whether a page is a year old or five years old. So, the year can stay.

In my journal, I write dates in the format 2026 X 13 III. The Roman numeral X here conveys the month and III conveys the weekday. It is helpful to know the day of the week that an entry was written. There is a world of difference between a Sunday and a Wednesday. A great read on the topic of weeks and days is the following.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. The seven day circle: The history and meaning of the week. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

And yet, it would be crazy to list the date on a blog post as “Tuesday 2026.” One scale of information that’s helpful to know generally is the month something was written. Knowing that something was written in November² tells me a lot about its context. I don’t have a clear sense of the feels of different days in a month, but November is not August.

After some fiddling, I’ve settled on date that look like this: October 2026.

<time class="listing-date"
  datetime="2026-10-16"
  title="Friday, October 16, 2026 at 19:00">
  October 2026
</time>

This gives the main information: Month and Year. If you look at the mouse over text, or tool tip, it shows the more verbose and informative listing with day of the week and time published.

Thanks, Wayback Machine! ↩︎
November is, truly, the worst month. ↩︎

Published: Oct 13, 2026 @ 18:43.
Last Modified: Oct 17, 2026 @ 07:19.

Overthinking Dates

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