Yeah, I think the author missed the mark with that line too.
Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader.
Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them.
We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
One of the things that is of constant annoyance is trying to find out when something was posted. Sometimes the time when it was posted is important, it allows me to ascertain how relevant the information therein is.
ok so this is helpful because I'm planning on starting a blog and want to use it to document some of the cool things I've done in the past.
Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article?
I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
for something like this I would feel that the two relevant dates are when the facts happened and when the act of writing is set.
As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date)
In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.
I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.