LifeLog — why cards now show the publish date

The home looked messy — and nobody had noticed why

Every blog has a detail that goes unnoticed until someone points it out: the date the card shows.

On LifeLog, cards displayed date — the historical event date of the post being told. That’s a deliberate narrative choice (“the journey is documented as it happens”): a post about a May bug can be published in July, and the card shows “May”.

It works beautifully for retrospectives. But it has a side effect:

When you publish several posts on the same day (like the cyclic grid of 2 posts/day), the home shows a sequence like 07, 09, 09, 06, 06, 07 — which looks… wrong.

That’s exactly what Samuel pointed out: “posts out of order too”. The order was correct (by pubDate), but the cards displayed the historical dates — and the brain reads the displayed date as the ordering criterion.

The conflict: event date vs publish date

LifeLog has a dual date system in frontmatter:

date: 2026-08-06 12:00:00 -03:00  # when the EVENT happened
pubDate: 2026-08-09 16:00:00 -03:00 # when we PUBLISHED

• The home sorts by pubDate (correct — most recently published first)
• But PostCard displayed date (historical)
• Result: sorting and display disagreed → looked like a bug

The fix was one line in src/pages/index.astro and src/pages/en/index.astro:

date={post.data.pubDate || post.data.date}

The resolution — and what it revealed

With pubDate on the card, the home became consistent: 09, 09, 09, 09, 08, 08, 07, 07 — the displayed date now matches the ordering.

The lesson goes beyond dates: every displayed metric must use the same criterion as the ordering. A card that shows “07” but sits on top because it was published on the 9th creates cognitive dissonance — the user assumes it’s wrong, even when the underlying logic is correct.

Technical details

Item	Before	After
Card shows	date (historical event)	pubDate (publish)
Home sorts by	pubDate	pubDate
Visual consistency	mixed dates	09, 09, 08, 08…

# PT and EN
sed -i "s/date={post.data.date}/date={post.data.pubDate || post.data.date}/" \
  src/pages/index.astro src/pages/en/index.astro
npx astro build  # 148 pages, clean build

And the portfolio?

The same discussion happened in the Portfolio: the RSS parser now sorts by pubDate desc and filters EN during parsing — ensuring the 3 “From the Blog” cards show the truly most recent posts, not the first ones in the XML.

The seemingly cosmetic detail — which date to show on a card — is actually a consistency contract between ordering and display.