A print newspaper has context built in. You hold it, it’s dated, it yellows. You know what you’re reading and when it’s from. The internet doesn’t have that. A three-year-old story about water rates looks exactly like one published this morning. I think that’s part of why the internet gives us anxiety — nothing is anchored, nothing has context.
The Guardian figured this out years ago. They put a bright yellow banner on old articles: “This article is more than X years old.” Simple. Nieman Lab called it a reminder of the power publishers have to use metadata to limit misinformation. I wanted this for years. I even asked the developers at Newspack — where I was paying over $550 a month for basic hosting — if they could build it. They said no.
Then I sat down with an LLM for less than an hour, described what I wanted, and it was on my site.
That was the first piece of code I ever built with AI, and it blew my mind. Not because the code was impressive — it was 13 lines of PHP. But because a tool I’d wanted for years, that I’d been told I couldn’t have, took less time to build than it takes to publish a story.
Old Article Notice has grown since then. You set the age threshold, write your message, pick your colors, and it handles the rest. It’s a way of taking responsibility for your site’s architecture — acknowledging that your old pages are still being read, and giving readers the context they need to read them well.
v1.2.0 adds modified-date awareness (recently updated articles skip the notice, even if they were originally published years ago), coverage links that point readers to newer stories on the same topic, and developer filters for customization.
Full disclosure: I’m a journalist, not a developer. This plugin was vibe-coded with Claude Code — I described what I wanted and we built it together. It runs in production on the Moab Sun News every day and it works, but I’m sure there are things a more experienced developer would do differently. If you try it and find something off, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. Open an issue or just email me at maggie@moabsunnews.com.
It’s free, it’s one file, and it adds zero JavaScript to your front end.
Maggie McGuire 
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