Do people update now pages?

In a past life I used to maintain a public weekly log. I had seen people maintaining it and thought to do the same. While I wrote logs for many weeks, it was hard for me to sustain the habit for long term.

Other than periodic logs, many people also maintain a /now page. If you are not aware of this, check this page and come back. According to indieweb, one criticism of the now page is that many people don't update it after setting up. I have similar views. Unless there is an automated mechanism or some easy way to update them, my now page is very likely to get stale.

But since this was just my hunch, I tried to see if I can collect some data around this. Thankfully, nownownow.com has a list of many now pages along with created and last updated date. Here are these two dates plotted on a scatter. You can select rectagular regions and see the selection on marginals:

It's definitely not the case that all now pages are up to date. But there is also a non-trivial number of people who keep their pages relatively fresh, many of which have started doing this long back.

In case you want to zoom, pan, and explore individual pages, here is the same scatter but clicks here will take you to individual /now pages.

Since I was not able to get jitters in temporal axis in vega-lite¹, few nodes are overlapping. Therefore, to access every page, you will have to check out the data file snapshot (as of [2025-02-02 Sun]) directly here. A more up to date version is kept on the nownownow site here.

During data exploration I realized that the checked on date is not really fresh and there are websites with newer 'last updated' date than what's listed in the dataset. I am not sure how the data is collected around last update and there doesn't seem to be a standard answer. Sites could have <meta> property around article update, but not all do. The body text around last update date is also very inconsistent. I have asked the author around the details here and should be able to provide an update on this once I know more. Updates to the last updated data are currently done manually by Derek (last major one was done mid of 2024 which explains the crowding in graph) and there is some partial automation in plan by latching on the 'updated at' element from these pages.