I hope you're enjoying wherever you are something like the lovely spring weather we're finally seeing here in New York, and that no one has pranked you for April Fools' Day too bad. We had a great March as Coates just noted, powered along by the hard work and great contributions you all made to the site. Thanks for that! We're looking forward to having an even more exciting April.
I'd like to send out an editorial request to all of you going forward. It's a very important request but one that won't take any considerable amount of time on your parts to implement.
When you're done writing a blog post, and you hit 'Publish' please, double-triple pretty please, have a look at the published post on your blog, and check the date and the time at which it is published. If the date/time are not the very moment you hit publish, go back to edit the blog post, and change the time stamp to reflect the moment you sent the post live.
The easiest way to change the time-stamp is to click on 'Manage' in the black global navigation bar at the top of the website, hover over the blog post in question, and then use the Quickedit options to update the date and time on that particular blog post.
That's all. If you're interested in the boring details of why I'm sending this note, read on. Otherwise, thank you in advance for abiding this request!
-MR
***
Our publishing queue is ordered based on date and time. That means when you hit 'publish', the blog post enters our network queue based on its time stamp, not based on the order of when it actually went live.
So, let's say you publish a blog post at 2:29 pm on April 1st, but it has a time stamp of March 26th, 4:30 am. The blog post will not appear in the network stream on April 1st - it will appear several days back on March 26th, with other blog posts actually published that day.
Because we aren't continuously reading further back into the network queue for days already passed, we won't see your blog post. Because we don't know it's there, we can't feature it on the homepage or promote it to other websites, etc.
Why do posts sometimes have the wrong timestamp on them? There are a few possibilities:
a. You Previewed the blog post while you were writing it, and the Preview assigned it a timestamp. This is a glitch we just discovered, and we're working to resolve it. Previewing a blog post you start writing and continue to edit is a fine thing to do. But the timestamp it creates is problematic, and so once you preview a post, you'll need to be mindful of the date and time on the post when you publish it;
b. You published the post and then changed it to draft. When you re-published it, you didn't update the time stamp;
c. You published the post 'privately' and then changed it to 'public' - the post took on the timestamp of the moment it was published privately.
However, fixing the timestamp is very easy to do, and a quick glance at the published post will tell you whether or not you need to update it.