Tweaking the calendar months for alphabetic optimisation :)

Not long after posting this tweet (on 20 Dapril 2013) I adopted this strategy in earnest, for ordering some (not all) of my files - this lets me simultaneously order by name ( alphabetically) while ordering them by date, which makes me pretty happy. Though I do always giggle when I get to Haugust.

Have often thought of renaming months tho: Anuary, Bruary, Charm, Dapril, Ey, Fune, Guly, Haugust, Iptember, Joctober, Movember, Zecember ;)
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) April 20, 2013

Visit the tweet on its page to see the replies that people sent me (the original problem I was having was within an Excel spreadsheet file, there's a fix for that but I also wanted something for Windows 'file manager' listings).

I can't believe it took me that long but here's how it's working for some ad hoc meetings notes for the Teaching London Computing project:

I've got the real date in there (which also opens the filename up to searching across folders) but the addition of the modified calendar month-name means they're in correct order. Pro-tip: use 01 etc for single digits otherwise I think 25 would come before 3 (depending on how your system's set up), but it's worth adopting this as much as possible as it seems to solve so many problems.

I wondered who else had come up with this idea and I can see that several fellow geniuses have also landed on this elegant and smug solution :)

A discussion on xkcd's 1179the comic "ISO 8601" (2 May 2013)
The cartoon itself is at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601.png

The tweets below are from 26 March 2009.

I propose that the months be alphabetised to make my life slightly easier. Anuary, Bebruary, Carch, Dapril, Eay, Fune, Guly, Haugust, etc
— Martin White (@martylog) March 26, 2009

@martylog How about Oneuary, Twobruary, Thrarch, Fopril, Fay, Sine, Sevly, Eighust, Ninptember, Tenctober, Elvember, Twelvember?
— Ed Jefferson (@edjeff) March 26, 2009

Not sure Ed has quite grasped the alphabetic feature being suggested but I like his idea ;)


International Date Format (30 June 2008)
Why do we have to suffer American dates (12 August 2007)