Blog post dating

When creating or editing a post in _posts/, always set the date: front matter to the actual current real-world date and time, including a timezone offset (e.g. date: 2026-07-15 20:55:00 -0400). Get the real time from the shell (date) rather than guessing.

Run date again immediately before writing the front matter, and again immediately before the commit that publishes it (right before git commit/git push, not reused from earlier in the session). Do not estimate, round, or reuse a timestamp checked several tool calls or minutes earlier, even by a few minutes, even “to be safe” by rounding forward. This site has no future: true in _config.yml, so a post dated even slightly ahead of the real time it’s built/pushed is silently excluded from the live site by Jekyll, no error, no warning, it just doesn’t appear. This has actually happened: a post was dated ~17 minutes ahead of the real time, causing it to go missing after being pushed to main, and it wasn’t caught until the user asked why it wasn’t showing up.

Never use a bare date (date: 2026-07-15) for a new post. Jekyll sorts posts by date, and a bare date is treated as midnight (00:00:00). A same-day post written in the evening but given a bare date will sort before an earlier post that has an explicit time, which puts posts out of order on the site relative to when they were actually written.

Do not backdate or future-date posts unless the user explicitly asks for a specific date.