Backdating Posts in Jekyll

This post was written well after 15 August 2026, but it is dated then. Jekyll is happy to publish it that way, and it slots into the archive as if it had always been there.

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How it works

Jekyll sorts posts by date, not by when the file was committed. Two places carry the date:

• The filename: _posts/2026-08-15-backdated-post-demo.md
• The front matter: date: 2026-08-15 09:30:00 +0000

Set both to the date you want and the post lands there — on the home page, in Archives, and in the sitemap. Nothing else is needed.

Past dates versus future dates

The two directions behave very differently:

Date	Built by default?
In the past	Yes
In the future	No

Backdating always works. Forward-dating does not: Jekyll’s future setting defaults to false, so a post dated tomorrow is silently skipped at build time. To publish those, add this to _config.yml:

future: true

A post that “disappears” after a push is very often just a future date combined with a timezone gap. This site leaves timezone unset in _config.yml, so dates are interpreted as UTC — which is 5 hours 30 minutes behind IST. Writing at 11 AM IST and stamping the post 11:00 +0000 puts it in the future.

The safest habit is to write the offset explicitly in the front matter, as +0000 or +0530, rather than leaving it off.

Drafts, the other option

If the goal is to hide a post rather than to date it, use _drafts instead. Files there need no date in the filename and are excluded from builds unless you pass --drafts locally:

bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts

Backdating is for reordering history. Drafts are for keeping things out of it.