How about a new PUBLISH box when adding a post and revising a post?
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How about a new PUBLISH box when adding a post and revising a post?
Show “First published on + date” and “Updated on + date” that is visible as dates under the Title of a post, instead of this in the current box:
Status: Published Edit Edit status
Visibility: Public Edit Edit visibility
Revisions: 25 Browse Browse revisions
Published on: Dec 25, 2023 at 10:20 EditFor example, this post was revised today 6 Jan 2023 but first published on 17 Jan 2015
Our Nineteenth Anniversary 2005-2024
Posted on January 17, 2015https://thomasnevin.com/2015/01/17/our-seventeenth-anniversary/
The REVISIONS page for the post only goes back two years.
Somewhere to show UPDATED date on post would automatically update the post in search engine and AI results.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there, to be sure I’ve understood, you wish to change the date your post is shown under? It is possible to do this by “Backdating” the post (or in your case foreward dating) and we cover how to do this here: https://wordpress.com/support/schedule-a-post-or-page/#backdate-a-post-or-page
Somewhere to show UPDATED date on post would automatically update the post in search engine and AI results.
Please note that using the above method of changing the post date will likely not result in search engines re-indexing the content. We’re not in direct control of Google but usually they are smart enough to sort out that the changes you have mage were to an existing post, instead of a new post.
Because of this we recommend that you publish a new post (you can restore the previous contents to undo your last changes on the existing post) since a new post is always more likely to be seen by search engines.
The REVISIONS page for the post only goes back two years.
You have been editing this post yearly since you first published it? There is a limit to how many revisions can be stored in our system so you may not see revisions going all the way back to 2015 due to how many edits you have made to the post over time. Sadly this will make recovering older versions of the content difficult.
One option you can try is to see if you can find the page on a previous snapshot of the site, as stored in the Internet Archive. This is an independent organization we are not directly connected to (their mission is to archive the internet and serve as a record of changes over time) but because your site has been publicly accessible for so long, you may find older copies of the page content in their archive. I do see they have listed your site here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220301000000*/https://thomasnevin.com/
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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Hi staff-totoro,
First, straight up, please thank WordPress engineers for providing the means whereby a clean duplicate of my site (and those of others no doubt) on the Wayback machine is captured, i.e. the site loads as if visited in a browser in its own URL, no broken links or images, very nice!, viz.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231015155542/https://thomasnevin.com/
Second, what I was hoping for was this: another option in the PUBLISH box when about to re-publish a post making three instead of TWO options: PUBLISH /DRAFT/REVISED that could show on the published post UNDER THE TITLE of the post, visible to the visitor, the previous date the post was published, followed directly underneath the new revised date, e.g. today’s date,
Our Nineteenth Anniversary 2005-2024
First or previously published 17 January 2015
Updated 25 December 2023
A further problem is the slug which shows a different wording from the revised title, seventeenth in the last revision, and nineteenth in this current revision, e.g :
Our Nineteenth Anniversary 2005-2024
https://thomasnevin.com/2015/01/17/our-seventeenth-anniversary/
If I change the slug to show same as new title, e.g. nineteenth, not seventeenth, will the old post (the url with seventeenth) disappear entirely from public view in the archives? I am trying to keep all previous posts on the same topic – our anniversary – visible on previous year’s archives, just adding more each year to the original post.
So, backdating or forward dating isn’t the issue here – I know how to do that – what I am trying to do is keep the same original post’s content, with revision, to show previous date and update date together., visible under the title of the post. At the moment, I am putting a note at the end of the post – e,g,
“Last update: December 2023” but would prefer the revision date to show automatically under the “Posted on 17 January, 2023”. It would entail a redesign of the publish box on the dashboard, etc.
No worries if this makes sense only to me and applies only to the post I’m wrangling with. Thanks again for the tips and hints.
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Hi again, I’m glad that resource was useful! The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine is not a Happiness Engineer project but the folks that run it are definitely people we would call “friends.”
Second, what I was hoping for was this: another option in the PUBLISH box when about to re-publish a post making three instead of TWO options: PUBLISH /DRAFT/REVISED that could show on the published post UNDER THE TITLE of the post, visible to the visitor, the previous date the post was published, followed directly underneath the new revised date, e.g. today’s date,
I do have a few suggestions here. The first is that while this functionality is not built into WordPress.com, WordPress itself is an open platform that others can develop ‘plugins’ for. This is similar in a lot of ways to the apps you add to a smartphone, where the phone itself offers incredible functionality out of the box, but it can’t do everything. In which case there is a “app for that.”
Well in this case, there is a plugin for that, which you can see here: https://wordpress.com/plugins/wp-last-modified-info
This was the one I found, but there may be others (in the way that you may find multiple smartphone apps that do the same thing) that you could consider as well by searching https://wordpress.com/plugins
One thing to be aware of is that adding plugins requires our Creator plan (the one above the plan you have currently) so it would be an added cost, but would also open up advanced options like the ability to install 3rd party plugins and themes.
Your cost would be less than you see here, since we would credit the cost of your current upgrade, and charge a reduced price to move up to the next level. You can see this confirmed here by noting the “credit applied” to higher level plans: https://wordpress.com/plans/thomasnevin.com
Your site looks like a labor of love (I really enjoy the old photographs by the way) but I will understand if that cost is not justified at the moment. With that in mind I wanted to make a second suggestion (that does not require upgrading) and that is to consider publishing a new post every time instead of updating the same post over and over. This is better overall for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since you would not be overwriting old content, but instead adding more content to the site.
Instead what I would do is add a a category to tie them all together like “Our Anniversary” and that would allow you to leverage the category pages that WordPress automatically creates, so you could show an archive of all the anniversary posts you have done. I can see you are familiar with categories and use them already. Image a page like this, but with your “Our Anniversary” posts displayed in chronological order instead: https://thomasnevin.com/category/biographica/
It’s true that this is nothing like the functionality you described, but it does allow you to build content on your site that is a real benefit to your search engine visibility, and can only help you to show up when people are searching the internet for historical content.
By the way, you may be interested to check out our upcoming SEO Foundations webinar, which is a great way to elevate your understanding of search engine fundamentals in under an hour. https://wordpress.com/learn/webinars/seo-foundations/
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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Many thanks, staff-totoro, for your compliments and suggested solutions. The MODIFIED plugin you suggest is exactly what I had in mind but didn’t know it actually existed as a WP app. I will try each of your suggestions, perhaps employ them all.
As you rightly note, our blog posts date back nearly two decades, and as search engines sometimes show more of the old posts than the new and more recent posts on the same topic and which contain newer and better researched information with more recent images, I try to include some of the newer stuff into the original post, eg.into a post from 2007, but then incongruities about dates appear – eg an image or document dated or watermarked 2015 – appearing in a post with published date of 2007. So you see, using your MODIFIED app will indicate to the reader that the original post has been revised. I will also create specific categories for the posts which are annually revised – the “Our Anniversary” posts, and “Christmas from Our Archives”.
Once again, all praise to you for your assistance.
Thos.
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