07 · Publishing ahead of time

One of the most useful mechanisms in the entire engine is perhaps ten lines long. An entry dated in the future is not visible. When the date passes, the entry appears by itself — on the site, in the RSS feed and in notifications.

In practice this means an author can write a hundred and twenty-one entries in a month and release them over six months, one a day. The site looks as though it is tended daily, while the work was done in batches, when there was time and appetite for it. For a project run alongside other commitments that is not a convenience, it is a condition of existence.

The same mechanism incidentally solved a problem we had not anticipated: how to hide an entry without deleting it. The answer is banal — set the date to the year 2099. The entry stays in the repository with its whole history but appears nowhere. The original date goes into the commit message, so restoring it is one edit.

A field was added that separates the displayed date from the date in the RSS feed. It came out of a specific collision: when you publish an archive backwards, entries carry genuine dates from months ago, but in the feed they need to be new — otherwise the automation redistributing them concludes there is nothing new.

Trivial mechanics, large consequences. The date stopped being metadata describing an entry and became machinery controlling its visibility.