noted on Mon, 09 Feb 2004
Plug-in: meta_date
The inspiration for this plug-in came from a Google search result that turned up an HTML archive of a w3c mailling list. The particular search item was interesting because the date of the file was displayed right beside the size of the file. I thought that if anyone wanted to check how ‘new’ a particular page was, they would merely need to see that information.
This particular plug-in will work fine for all static and dynamic blosxom blogs, but only with the characteristic that permalinks will refer to one specific post, instead of a page containing a series of posts, like the date archive.
While the plug-in works, the benefits to adding a date is still a bit nebulous in my mind. Questions that come up for me include:
- If this is present, and someone does a search with Date constraints, does Google use the meta tag in favour of the date/time it last indexed that page?
- The yyyy-mm-dd format is a part of an ISO 8601 specification, which you can see a note about from the W3C NOTE-datetime document. I have not seen many pages that use this tag, and I’ve seen even less documentation about it. Does Google only care about the year/month/day, or would they also readily parse the time of day? Not knowing the answer, I’ve provided support to provide the time of day in the meta tag. After Google re-indexes my site, then I hope to see what the results do. If they do nothing, then I may turn it off by default in the plug-in.
Mind you, when I say that the benefits of this plug-in is nebulous, it’s not to say that I don’t know what it would be good for, but rather, I’m not sure what good it will do. You may wish to read my post on Using Google to Create Comment Threads to see what use I’d put the date tag to.
Download the plug-in here. It requires Blosxom 2.0.