Changelog

A changelog is a chronological, public list of what changed in a product and when. The useful kind is written for users: what you can now do, what got faster, what stopped being annoying. The useless kind lists internal refactors and dependency bumps.

For a launched product a changelog does three jobs. It shows the product is maintained, which is the single most common unstated question a prospective user has. It creates a stream of dated content on your own domain, which search engines treat as freshness and answer engines can cite. And it gives you the raw material for a relaunch, since the honest test of whether a relaunch is warranted is whether the changelog since the last one would interest a stranger.

Conventions worth following: newest first, one dated entry per release, a short summary line and then bullets, and a stable URL per entry so an individual change can be linked.

Directories increasingly surface this. Uneed’s listing pages carry a “latest updates” block fed by the maker, which keeps a permanent listing from going stale the week after launch.