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Time Is Hard

Web, Hugo

I feel like the idea of having to put a disclaimer on a post that it’s old, is a bad sign. The simple fact that a number of people need a big sign saying “This post is old”, is kinda depressing. And the worst part, it’s not a bad idea.

This post isn’t going to be about that, its going to be about how much I hate writing functions to handle time.

Yesterday was last year


My plan was simple, if a post is over a year old, have Hugo put a disclaimer on it. I just needed to calculate when a year had past.

{{- $PostYear := .Date | time.Format "2006" | int -}}
{{- $CurrentYear := now.Year | int -}}
{{- $YearDif := math.Sub $CurrentYear $PostYear -}}
{{- if ge $YearDif 1 -}}
	<p class="notice">
	  This post is over {{ if eq $YearDif 1 }} a year{{- else -}}{{- $YearDif }} years{{- end }} old. The information here may be out of date, and may not reflect my current thoughts or opinions.
	</p>
{{- end -}}

This was my first go at it, can you see the problem? Any post that was written in 2023, would have the disclaimer. In the span of one day, a post could be over a year old.

Unfortunately, I found this out after I pushed a build of my site with it. I’m the kind of person, when I notice an issue like that, I have to fix it. And it was already 1:30AM. Time to get to work.

After reading the Hugo docs, and a number of forum posts, and Go-lang examples. I came up with this.

{{- $PostYear := .Date -}}
{{- $CurrentYear := time.Now -}}
{{- $YearDifU := math.Sub $CurrentYear.Unix $PostYear.Unix -}}
{{- $TPostYear := .Date | time.Format "2006" | int -}}
{{- $YearDif := math.Sub (now.Year | int) $TPostYear -}}
{{- if ge $YearDifU 31536000 -}}
	<p class="notice">
	  This post is over {{ if eq $YearDif 1 }} a year{{- else -}}{{- $YearDif }} years{{- end }} old. The information here may be out of date, and may not reflect my current thoughts or opinions.
	</p>
{{- end -}}

This takes the time and date that a post was published on, and converts it to Unix time. It then checks to see if one year1 has past, compared to the current time2. There’s also some Hugo to print “a year” vs “[number] years” to make it read better. All that, just to get this to print, when it should.

This post is over 600 years old. The information here may be out of date, and may not reflect my current thoughts or opinions.

An example disclaimer

I don’t like working with time. If you want to use this, here’s a Gist.


  1. 31536000 in Unix time ↩︎

  2. Time of site build, this is a static site at the end of the day. ↩︎


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