Some time ago, the box on which my blog is hosted went dramatically down, and I had to restore the blog by populating the git repository again, from my local copy.

Unfortunately, that means that the wiki had to be rebuilt from scratch, and all creation dates were messed up, leading some planet-like sites to show all of my posts again.

To ensure that this won’t happen again (even if I switch branches in the git repositories, move some files around, trash the ikiwiki cache, etc.), it looks like using meta dates is the way to go, for example:

 [[meta date="2009-07-02"]]

(One can use 2009-07-02 00:00:00 and 2009-07-02 01:00:00 to sort several entries on the same day, too.)

This way, all pages are rendered identically on every system.

To help maintaining those extra dates (kind of a burden, to be honest), I’ve written a tiny Perl script to automate it, and specified an alias in .git/config for that repository:

 [alias]
 ikiwiki-check = "!blog/2009/07/02/ikiwiki-dates.pl"

Inline replacement (in case of conflicts: same date without time, or with same time) or additions are then performed, and git status will show what needs tweaking.

More work that I initially imagined, but robustness should follow.