Skip to content

Regarding file timestamps and blogpost dates

Carlos Fenollosa edited this page Apr 26, 2016 · 3 revisions

Bashblog stores the blog post date in two places:

  • file timestamps
  • an HTML comment inside the blogpost (new as of 2.7, as per #96)

On rebuild, the system tries to sync both, in case the file timestamp was messed with by an external utility. If the HTML comment is not present, as it is the case for old blogposts, rebuild will create the HTML comment based on the file timestamp.

This timestamp inside the HTML comment, if present, takes precedence over the file timestamp.

It is recommended that you run bb.sh rebuild upon updating to 2.7 to keep your blog post dates safe.

Why file timestamps?

Bashblog uses file timestamps to sort blog posts in numerous places in the code. For example, to list posts, create the index page, etc. This is a key feature to avoid processing 100s of files in disk just to get a post date. Please don't mess with this system. The new feature added in 2.7 is aimed at recovering from the data loss produced by accidental file timestamp tampering by other utilities, not as a means to keep two parallel systems.