I noticed something interesting on one particular blog I visited today. NONE of the featured posts have dates! Not even the comments! The regular posts on the front page did have a date, but the single post pages did not for any post in any other category.

A few WordPress themes nowadays allow you to feature posts in a certain category you designate constantly above the rest of the content. This is a great way to drive people further into your blog as they think they simply have to read that content. Which is fine. But I think the lameness kicks in once you become a regular reader and you remember seeing the same article from a couple of months back being featured again, with the same months old comments. But of course there are no dates, so a new reader would not know.

What a great {read lame} way to falsely increase your importance. Because if any new visitors come by they might see a featured post with 20 - 30 comments and think wow the community is really involved here. I must subscribe!

It might have short term benefits in increasing your subscriber base as large numbers of comments would entice most web surfers to get a false idea about the popularity of a blog. What they probably don’t know is that all those comments may have been collected over-a-number-of-months from recycling the content over and over again. Not having date stamps on single post pages and comments just doesn’t seem right to me.

The thing that irks me is not that the blogger is trying to gain new subscribers {who isn’t}, but taking it’s present readers and subscribers for a ride. Which I think is lame.

At least if you would have added something new to it, it would have been fine. I don’t know maybe I’m alone on this? How would you react to me if I took my date stamp off and recycled old content periodically by “featuring” it.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.