Edited Posts Don’t Trigger Feed Readers
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The Problem: I’ve recently created this blog and the majority of my postings will involve editing an initial post multiple times, adding a few lines of content each time. However, I’ve recently discovered that editing a post (even if you also edit the posting date) does not result in it being considered ‘updated’ by some feed readers (the ones I’ve tested are Bloglines and Google Reader). I still need to verify this, but it seems that the feed reader NetVibes does have the ability to consider this an update. So, the basic problem is that regular readers who use a feed reader like Bloglines won’t realize that there are updates happening when they actually are.
Primary Question: My basic question is whether there is something I can do as a user (i.e., a WordPress setting, changing HTML code, changing feed info somehow) to communicate to all or most feed readers that the edited post should be considered updated?
Secondary Question: If I as a user cannot change the way this works in any way, does anyone have any recommendatios of good feed readers that might possibly be able to handle this? (I can then recommend these to my regular readers.)
Related Thoughts: I have thought about the possibility of just creating a new post each time and deleting the old post, as I’m pretty sure this would take care of the problem, but I’m guessing it would delete the comments on the old post as well, which I don’t want to do. In my searches on this problem, it appears that in the past WordPress did offer a bit more sensitivity in regards to this, but that some people found it to be a ‘bug’ instead of a ‘feature’, since it would show ‘updates’ when only something relatively trivial had been edited in the post. I’m not sure the best way to remedy this, but what might be a solution would be to offer the user an option as to what types of ‘trigger’ information are included in the feed, or even a way of manually changing some of the most common pieces of ‘trigger’ information.
Look forward to hearing anyone’s input! I have done a search in the FAQs and forums, but I’ve missed any obvious answers to this problem, feel free to post the relevant link(s).
Thanks!
DustinThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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That’s not really how RSS readers work though and to be fair if I would unsubscribe to the feed if Google Reader marked edited posts as unread feeds.
Seeing that you didn’t specify precisly what you’re planning to edit, have you perhaps considered setting up some pages? Posts are moving whereas pages are more static information. http://support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/
That way you could simply make a post when pages have been updated.
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Thanks, carocat, for your input! I guess using pages would be one way of getting around this, but I don’t think that’s the way I want to go, for a number of reasons. Basically, what I’m wanting to do is gradually grow the content of a post, but then once I’m done adding content to it have it be treated as a post (rather than a page).
What I’ve done for now is included a page ‘FAQs for Regular Readers’ where I mention what my normal posting schedule is and then mention that some rss readers won’t pick up on edits. That way, regular readers can at least check the blog on their own, but with a bit more effort involved than if a reader would pull it in for them.
What would be really nice is an option in the ‘Edit Post’ screen where you could click to tell WordPress to treat it as a new post. But maybe I’m one of the few odd ones who wants to do posting like this? :o)
Thanks again!
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I really do think that’s making it very complicated and you’re asking a lot of your readers to have them manually check every single post every so often.
Blogs aren’t really supposed to work that way.
Take my blog for example, I have just under 500 posts on there and if I have an update to a previous post I make a new one linking to it.
After I made this post, people in the comments were asking about something: http://carocat.co.uk/2006/11/01/splinter-cell-double-agent/ so I made a followup: http://carocat.co.uk/2006/11/14/splinter-cell-double-agent-revisited/ which linked to it which created the following pingback which means it links the two posts: http://carocat.co.uk/2006/11/01/splinter-cell-double-agent/#comment-293
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I agree with Cat. Expecting people to keep checking a lot of posts puts demands on your readers and their time. As a reader, I wouldn’t do it.
At least with pages and page navigation, you can put the most recent information at the top and people can click if they want to see quickly what’s new.
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Thanks, carocat and ellaella, for your responses!
Let me see if I can clarify a bit more what I’m actually trying to do, so it doesn’t sound quite as crazy as it must at the moment.
The basic type of post on my blog is a poem. I start out by posting a new post with the title and one of four verses. After a day or two, I add (by editing the post) the second verse, and so on, until the poem is finished. Until it’s finished, I make no other posts, and once it’s finished, I don’t anticipate ever editing it again, unless there’s some typo or something I didn’t catch, etc. Thus,
1. The post being edited is always at the top.
2. There is only ever one post that would need to be checked (manually or otherwise) for changes (and it’s always at the top).Hope that clarifies my situation a bit more.
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I would suggest you save the poem as a draft until it’s ready to be published, OR that you establish a pattern of posting one stanza the first day, two the second (including a link to the first, but also including the whole stanza again) etc.
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Why don’t you just have it as a sticky post for the duration of that time? That way it’s displayed prominently to people visiting your blog.
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Thanks, raincoaster, for contributing to this topic. The draft/publish approach doesn’t fly for me, since it’s not so much that I want to be able to write the poem in incremental chunks; the idea is more that I want to ‘unroll’ (there’s probably a better term than that) it in incremental chunks. In fact, most of what I’ll post will already be completely written beforehand.
Your second option is a bit like one solution I had thought of — simply doing a new post each time with the addtional information (there’s no real reason I want to keep the old post, or even have a link to it, because of the amount of ‘clutter’ it would eventually cause). The only catch with this (I think) is that when you delete a post, you lose all the comments that went with that post. I just now did a bit of a search in the forums to see if moving comments from one post to another was an option; basically it’s not presently available as a feature, but you can do a copy/paste when you’re logged out to make it look like that same person made the comment. Hmm… so no easy go in this direction either… But thanks, anyway, raincoaster.
carocat, if I’m understanding sticky posts right, they wouldn’t really gain me anything over the way I’m doing my posts (see my summary points 1 and 2 in my last post). The main problem I’m looking to resolve isn’t visibility on the blogsite itself, but rather the recognition of a significant ‘update’ (in my case, edit) by a reader’s RSS reader.
At this point, I think I’m going to go with what I see as my best option for posting these types of edits:
1. Create a new post.
2. Copy and paste the old post into the new and add the new content.
3. Copy and paste comments (if any) that I really want to stay attached to the post.
4. Delete the old post.I don’t know for sure how my readership will develop, but my hunch is that I’m probably not going to have to waste too much time copying and pasting a lot of comments that are made in the 4-8 day window in which a particular post is being developed. But we’ll see! :o)
I’m not ready to call this resolved, since what I’m mentioning above is a workaround that’s a bit clunky. I’m wondering, carocat, since you’re a moderator, what’s the policy on how long a topic is open until it’s closed? Is it after a certain period of inactivity? Also, in your opinion (or others as well), do you think one or two of the features that I’ve mentioned (an option to check for treating an edited post as a new one, and the ability to move comments from one post to another) would be worth proposing to the development team (if they haven’t been already), or are they busy with more important stuff? :o)
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Treating an edited post as new might be desirable — for you for these particular posts — but there are many, many reasons for editing posts.
ie: two months down the road someone mentions a typo or you notice it and wonder how you missed it. You change the social bookmarks you use or decide to use them for the first time and go back and edit posts. Treating those as new would not be helpful.
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Good point, ellaella, and I agree with you. But what I would propose is the WordPress user being given the ‘option’ to treat it as new, with the default setting being to not treat it as new. That would at least give the user a bit more flexibility, and if he chooses to treat minor edits as ‘updates’ he might lose readers or get flak from them, but that’s then the result of his choice rather than an unalterable part of the system. And for those who don’t want to be overwhelmed with options like this that they might not care about, then ideally there would be a pick and choose system for customizing your ‘edit post’ screen, which I think you can already do to at least some degree.
I’m guessing the basic issue here is that I’m attempting to use a blog post in a bit of an ‘un-traditional’ (if you can use that word for something as relatively new as blogging is) way, as opposed to the majority of other bloggers. But I think it is a valid use, especially for concentrated content like poetry.
Thanks for your input! I’m enjoying hearing the thoughts of others who have been involved with WordPress and blogging more than myself.
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Sorry, I’ve been busy the last couple days.
When considering deleting posts you have to keep in mind that it’s not just the comments. If you delete your post all the link towards it will throw up a 404 page, search engines won’t find it and so on. It really isn’t recommended.
You can move comments, but you’d have to do it manually which basically means that you need to post every comment manually again, copying and pasting the name, email and content for every post. Which really is a lot of work!
And yes, you’re correct, you did describe a sticky post in your above post and I completely missed that, sorry.
I’m wondering, carocat, since you’re a moderator, what’s the policy on how long a topic is open until it’s closed? Is it after a certain period of inactivity?
We don’t lock topics, but they do get closed automatically after several months. I believe it’s about six months giving itplenty of time. :)Also, in your opinion (or others as well), do you think one or two of the features that I’ve mentioned (an option to check for treating an edited post as a new one, and the ability to move comments from one post to another) would be worth proposing to the development team (if they haven’t been already), or are they busy with more important stuff? :o)
And I’m just a mere moderator to clean up the forums, delete duplicate posts, all my opinion is just my own and quite frankly I bow to most other volunteers that have much more knowledge than myself!In the 2 1/2 years of blogging here and more or less frequent volunteering I don’t recall ever coming across a feature request like yours I’m afraid. I do suggest, however, giving a shout to staff directly as they don’t tend to read all the threads in the forums. http://support.wordpress.com/contact/
The benefit of a sticky post is that it is displayed right at the top meaning that people see it as the first thing when they come to your blog and they don’t have to go trawling through posts/pages to find your content.
I have been thinking about it and I really don’t see any other simple option.
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Ok, so thinking about it a bit more, you’re planning to extend the poem in the first post and continually edit it until you’ve completed it and then move on to the next one, correct?
Looking at your blog I see that you have this post: http://wordsthatburn.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/notes-for-words-that-burn/ which is a post abotu your blog in general. Have you considered perhaps including a note for each new stanza of your poems to explain them a bit more?
Basically you could continue editing your sticky post/poem and then write a post explaining it a bit more or perhaps add a picture or something and linking back to the sticky.
That way you’d trigger the new post RSS notification, get to keep your sticky meaning no comments have to be moved and you give uncreative people such as myself an option to look into your thought process!
Just an idea though, I am grasping at straws. :)
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Thanks much, carocat, for your additional input on this. As far as deleting posts, I’m still practicing that, but don’t tell the blog police! ;o) At the moment, I don’t have my blog set for search engines to see it, although I may change that at some point in the future. As far as links that others have to the post, don’t know if anyone’s doing that yet, but if it becomes a problem I may need to make a note somewhere that the current post is, in a sense, ‘under construction’. Although, who knows, at that point I may just go back to just doing edits instead of new posts, as the preferred option.
As far as the notes go, my approach is to include them in one post following the poem post, after it’s completed. That way it doesn’t interrupt the flow so much. So that one doesn’t fly for me either (hate to keep doing this to you! :o) ).
I’ll see once, I may send something in to the staff just to see if anything comes of it, and meanwhile, if I come up with any other brainstorms I’ll make sure and post them here in case anyone else has this same issue.
Thanks again!
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