Dates In This Blog

The events in this blog all take place in the 20th Century, mainly from 1940 to 1946. Of course the text contains the correct dates but I would like to make each blog entry look like it was published at the time of the events that it describes.

I have decided that I am going to date my posts 100 years later than I wish and set the formatting so only two digit years will be shown. I could of chosen a 70 year offset. 70 years is appropriate as I have set this up ready to go on the 8th May 2010, that is exactly 70 years after Alister received his letter putting him on a weeks notice to sail.


The reasons that I cannot actually date the posts as I wish are because of a limitation of Blogger. The Blogger post form includes Post Options that allow you to set the date of the post. Unfortunately it has two behaviors that conspire to block you from pre-dating your posts as you might wish.

1. If you enter a date format that Blogger does not like then it simply ignores your entry but does not trouble you by telling you it has done so. So you must enter a year that Blogger will accept. The following are the rules as deduced from experimentation.
2. You cannot date a post before 1970
3. You may date a post anytime in the future (well at least 2199)
4. If you enter from 70-99 it will assume 19nn.
5. If you enter from 00-29 it will assume 20nn.
6. So you can enter any year from 1970 onwards as four didgits.
7. If you do date your post into the future watch out,  it will not publish till the date you set. The way around it is to publish without specifying a date and then immediately edit and set the date you require.

Timing of Events

In some cases is is desirable to put events in the right sequence. A number of time zones were used in the North Atlantic and it can be tricky to work out which time zone is being used in a report and you can sometimes see that those writing and reading the reports were themselves confused. See Time In The Atlantic.