For a while (currently?) there was SEO "wisdom" going around about not putting dates on content so that search engines would treat the content as "evergreen" rather than "stale".

There's a related trend of updating the publish date so it's always today, or recent.

Seems like pretty timeless content to me.

There's a couple of things that made me think the article was way older than it actually is (and made me mildly irritated that it doesn't include the publication date).

First off, the author starts off by talking about GMT and goes on to educate the reader how UTC is actually the current standard. Maybe it's just me but I thought this would be common knowledge by now, while the author frames this as some sort of a revelation.

Then there's the jab about The IERS breaking Wikipedia's css which just doesn't seem to happen on the two devices I opened it on, so I assumed that was the case prior to Wikipedia's redesign.

Minor things for sure, and the content itself is pretty timeless (heh).

Leap seconds are also set to be removed eventually. UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset, at least until enough seconds add up for the BIPM to care about the offset and insert a leap minute or hour or something TBD.

> UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset

I'm not sure what you mean, but this sounds wrong. The whole thing about leap second abolishment is to effectively disconnect UTC from UT1, i.e. allow DUT1 to grow unbounded and make UTC a fixed offset of TAI.

Right, swapped UT1 and TAI in my head. Oops!

While there's no explicit publication date, there are a few shell commands which strongly imply that the blogger was writing on or about "Tue Jul 30 23:52:11 UTC 2024".

> This one appears to have been published in the summer of 2024.

"Summer" in certain parts of the world, at least.

Sharp!

I figured I'd check the RSS feed to see the timestamp there, only to discover that this "blog" doesn't even have a feed!

Thanks! The irony is not missed on me. I think I have the dates internally in the article metadata, just didn't set up my Hugo templates to display it. TODO!

Ah, so it wasn’t some SEO trick (see your sibling comment) after all :)

Thanks for the fun and informative blog post!