Developing a publishing system like Hot Ink is an interesting job. For one, you spend a lot of time thinking about seemingly small things that turn out to be a big deal. One such example: an article’s date.

Seems pretty straight forward, right? Articles are published on a particular date and that date is important for the context of the article. Articles without a date are missing a very important piece of information. So, of course, we add one.

But which date?

What do we have to choose from? Off the top of my head: the date an article was first saved, the date it was approved by an editor, the date it became available online, the date it was published in a print edition, the date it was last saved, or simply an arbitrary date not related to any of these.

There are a few things we have to keep in mind. First of all, it’s a plain fact that an article in your paper’s archive is either available to the public or it isn’t. We don’t want the article appearing online the moment it’s first saved, so we need to decide when an article becomes available to the public. Since this is a switch that will happen instantaneously, it needs to have a time-of-day, not just a date, even if that time-of-day is midnight on the article’s day-of-publication.

Second, we know that users will sometimes want to upload articles that are dated in the future or the past. You could be uploading old archived articles, or a story that’s under embargo. You may just be uploading tomorrow’s edition tonight and holding the online versions until the print edition drops.

Third, we want the system to work “right” without the user having to think very hard. That means our default behaviour should be simple and predictable, but flexible for even the special cases we can’t anticipate in advance.

So how do we do it?

Since the internet doesn’t publish on a weekly schedule, all our articles will have not only a date, but a time-of-day. That means articles that would once have been dated simply “May 6, 2009″ will now have to become “May 6, 2009 at 2:13PM”. Luckily, for the most part, you won’t have to worry about the date. It’ll be set automatically the moment you (or your editor) hits “Publish”. After all, that’s literally the date and time-of-day you published the article.

But what if you want to upload an archived article? One from last week, last year, or even 15 years ago. You certainly don’t want those articles appearing as though they were just published.

Or, what if you wanted to upload an article today but have it appear online sometime later? Maybe you’ve written an in-depth feature series to publish in pieces over the summer. Maybe you’ve got a movie review embargoed until just before release. Hopefully you’re not uploading articles now and waiting for the print edition to make them available.

For past or future publishing, we’re making a “custom date” option available. If, for any reason, the auto-date doesn’t meet your needs, you can feel free to attach your own “custom” date. If that date is in the past, the “publish” button will make your article available in the archive for anyone looking. If it’s in the future, your article will be scheduled to “publish” on that future date, provided it has the necessary editorial approval.

But, it’s your system, not ours. What do you think of our solution? If it were up to you what would you do differently?

P.S. I didn’t even get a chance to talk about time-zones, but they’re a whole other layer on top of the “date” system. Luckily, you’ll never have to worry about time-zones, Hot Ink takes care of that for you.