weBLOG! do YOU?

Description:

WP-Smartdate looks for relative date expressions in your blog posts, such as “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday,” “last Friday,” looks at the current date, and computes what day you were referencing in plain old English. WP-Smartdate then puts a machine readable reference (like “2007-11-26″) in an abbr tag microformat.

While many professional information retrieval algorithms go far beyond the scope of this program, smartdate helps the process along by adding machine-readable tags to relative date expressions. In addition, these machine tags, in turn, help the human: a search on Google for “November 7th, 2007,” for example, will not pull up a document talking about “yesterday,” written on the 8th, but it will pull up the smartdate output of 2007-11-07.

Blog posts are often written in the “now,” using relative time expressions without concern for how the text will be read in the future. WP-Smartdate makes such posts easier to read and comprehend temporally.

Smartdate-compatible expressions

The following types of expressions are resolved with respect to the speech time–in WP-Smartdate’s case, the blog post date.

1. simple references: “yesterday,” “today,” “tomorrow”
2. next/last day of the week expressions: “this Friday,” “this past Saturday,” “this Monday”

For the future

• static dates: “January 1st, 2007″
• duration shift expressions: “5 days ago,” “fourscore and seven years ago”
• day of the week shifts: “2 Fridays ago”
• clean up the code!