Here's how I typically read PerlMonks: load Recently active threads, open everything that looks interesting in background tabs, and hit "I've checked all of these" so that my queue empties. Then I go and actually read the posts at my lesiure.

The problem is that sometimes I get distracted (you know, food, work, sleep -- that sort of stuff). And coming back to things, I don't remember when I'd loaded a particular page -- was it five minutes ago, or yesterday? (Sometimes I can keep a lot of open tabs!) If a node is new, I'd just go ahead and read it; but if it's been up for a while I'd prefer to reload it and see if it's gathered any comments. Of course I can reload everything indiscriminately before I read it, but that's not very nice on the server.

So, as a cue for page age, can a "Generated on" timestamp be added somewhere visible, preferably near the top of the page?

(This should be in the user's local time, but that might not incur an additional database round trip since the node has its creation date rendered in that timezone anyway (right?).)

What do you think?

In reply to Timestamp on content pages by gaal

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