Question about Blogging Systems

dates in the distant past, partial dates ...

[Garden Variety]

If you're familiar with various blogging systems, maybe you can help me out.

I want to create a website of articles dealing with historical topics, all in the past.

I was thinking a blog might be a way to create and organize such a website. It's be great to take advantage of the chronological and topical organization that blogs use.

But I am wondering about dates. For example, one event might have been "June 4, 1886" but other events might spread over several days or months, for example, an ongoing event that took place in "August 1848". Other articles might cover events and developments that might be best described as occurring in a year or years, "1776" or "1860-1865"

My questions:

Do you know of a blog that allows you to enter dates in the distant past?

Is it possible to enter just a month and a year "August 1848", instead of entering a complete date "June 4, 1886"? Is it possible to enter even less complete dates?

Thanks very much!

[ergophobe]

Interesting question. I make my living as a professional historian and have been thinking about a historical blog as well, though I would not care about chronology like you do for my stuff, it's a thought-provoking question.

Wordpress, Nucleus, Drupal all let you edit the timestamp. I assume all blogs do. The question is, do they maintain the date as a Unix timestamp, in which case you could only go back to the 1970s.

Quick check
- drupal: unix timestamp. No go there
- Wordpress: uses a MySQL datetime field, which can take values back to the year 1000, but it looks like it must use a Unix timestamp somewhere along the way, because the oldest date I can get is Dec 31, 1969.

I suspect you'll find the same.

So the possibilities are something like

- use tags for year (that's easy)
- use something like template variables in ModX or CCK fields in drupal and write some sort of module that would handle the date sorting.

Personally, I think the easiest thing to do would be to create some sort of field that is stored in the form YYYYMMDD so that it would, by default, sort correctly, and then format it into D(D) Month, YYYY for display.

[ergophobe]

Now I have to go back to July 10, 1550, and get back to work.

[Garden Variety]

"Dec 31, 1969"

Seen that.

That's where my posts end up whenever I try to use a partial date (e.g., "June 2007").

[mayest]

I don't know about other blogging platforms, but in EE I would use a custom field. When entering the post, I'd set that field to whatever date I wanted. It would be a text field, not really a date. Then, in my template where I would usually place the post date, I'd put in the text from the custom "historical date" field instead. I assume that most (all?) platforms have something similar.

[ergophobe]

Getting the date in there isn't so much the problem, but GV wants to (I think)

- sort by date
- have clickable dates

Clickable years are easy - just use some tagging system. The sort by date is something you could do with custom fields (CCK) and Views in drupal.

There's still a thorny issue. Let's say he's doing US history and has articles on the Civil War, the elections of 1864, Abraham Lincoln and the Battle of Antietam.

When I click on the date for the battle of Antietam, I would presumably want anything with overlapping dates, which would include all of the articles mentioned. When I click on the dates for Lincoln, I would likely want anything concerning dates within that range.

I think that will take some custom magic on the back end.