Dating Blogs Back To The 1800s

[mercave]

Title
Dating Blogs Back To The 1800s

Short, concise description of the idea
I'd like to date my blogs all the way back to the 1800s for genealogical reasons.

Full description of the ideaCurrently you can only past date blogs to the 1970's. I've got some old letters and diary entries from my family, lots from world war 2 and a few from 1978. I really

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I've added the "date out of order / backdate" tag to this entry because while it's not specifically to do with that feature, it's likely that other people searching for this same thing would look under that tag, and it's likely to be used with that, depending on individual circumstances.

It would be very popular with any roleplayers who are doing things prior to the 1970s.

[dougs]

I strongly suspect that LJ uses the UNIX-standard method for storing dates/times -- a long int that counts seconds since 1st January 1970, as described here.

If that's the case (as is likely), it'll make implementing this suggestion more than usually difficult.

[polyfrog]

My understanding from the occasion I requested this sort of change is that that is the historic reason for the limitation, but the underpinnings have since been rewritten and that the UNIX epoch is no longer an issue per se.

[imc]

Although that's meant to be a signed long int, which can represent any dates between 1901 and 2038 (not inclusive). If LiveJournal doesn't accept any date before 1970 or after 2038 then it's only using half the available values.

[pinterface]

As I recall, LJ stores times as 32-bit unix timestamps, which means this isn't technically possible.

On the bright side, if LJ makes it to 2038 they'll have to have solved the technical problem (probably by migrating to 64-bit time_t), or we'll all roll over to 1970 or 1901 or something.

[polyfrog]

See my comment above.

[pinterface]

Hey, I qualified it with "as I recall", and it has been a rather long time since I've looked at LJ's code.

[lady_angelina]

Ehhhhh... This would be a very nice ponie to have, but I don't see a pressing need for it. Unless the devs can tweak the database to easily accommodate for this sort of thing, I'm going to say no.

[kayt_arminta]

I don't see this as a bad idea. I just see this as in idea. If LJ can do this, it'd be great, if not... meh.