Mr. Edity-Pants Hates RSS Readers? No!
Posted on March 7, 2006 in Blogging
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
I was just chatting with Travis about editing in blog posts, and he mentioned that every time I make a little change in something I’ve already posted, his newsreader picks it up as a new article! Since I’m one to make dozens of little changes to an article post, this must be pretty awful for some people. Feedburner probably provides some buffering of this, but if it’s a problem for people let me know and I’ll figure out what I need to do to fix it.
Part of the joy of blogging for me is the immediacy of publishing, without having to worry about getting things exactly right. I hope this isn’t a widespread issue, or that there’s a solution that’s easily applied.
14 Comments
Doesn’t seem to be a problem for me, using NewsFire on OS X.
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Bloglines has the same problem – and every time I think you posted a new article :)
I’ve been meaning to blog this, but feel free to do it for me.
Bloglines has a feature that allows a user to ignore updates. Use the “edit subscription” link on an individual feed. In the resulting dialog box, change “Updated Items” from “Display as New” to “Ignore”. You will never see another updated post from that feed again.
But come to think of it, there is one small drawback to using this method. Maybe I’ll blog it after all.
Eriend: I’m really sorry for that… thanks for suffering through it! Maybe I should attend that RSS session at SXSW.
Thanks Cuccu – didn’t know that.
This is interesting because I use Thunderbird for my RSS reading and I rarely get duplicates of your posts. Once in a great while I do, but not very often. I had no idea you made dozens of edits to each post!
I’m subscribed to a few dozen RSS feeds and only 2 seem to republish articles for every little edit, (Boston Dirt Dogs & Luc Latulippe) so I have NO IDEA what the common denomiator here could be.
I’ve often wondered if I do this to my RSS subscribers when I make edits to my posts. This could be a major reason people unsubsribe from feeds! Definitely an issue that needs a solution and I’m confident you’re the right man for the job Dave! :)
Hm, Google Reader doesn’t have that problem either with this site. It does happen occasionally with other sites, though. Which is good, because I hate getting excited for a brand new post (yay!) while it’s only a typo-correction.
I don’t have that problem with Thunderbird, phew. That could be pretty annoying.
I don’t have a problem with it as Newsfire doesn’t update in such.
For the record, I use NetNewsWire. I never really saw it as a problem, I just noticed it as something that happened. I’m going to further investigate when I get to the office and see if there’s perhaps an option to turn it off.
Thanks for the additional reports, guys! Travis, thanks for telling me about this in the first place. Like Brad mentioned above, it’s something I wondered but didn’t come across it when testing the RSS feed in Bloglines. I had only tested it there and not with other readers.
Basically, RSS readers differ in how they determine whether an RSS item is new. For some, if the post URL has already been seen, they just move on (that’s the way I often build them). For others, they actually do a comparison (usually an md5) of the content and if it’s a modified version of an existing post, they update and mark as unread. Bloglines is one of the most aggressive with this feature.
Dave, great site. Will you marry me? I just want to be introduced around the Internet as Mrs. Edity-Pants.
It never occurred to me that continual editing of previous posts would pose a problem for RSS readers. Glad it doesn’t seem to be a huge issue for your readers, based on the comments here.
I was always under the impression that you weren’t supposed to go back and make edits to blog entries, but I do it all the time anyway, just to replace clunky words, restructure a sentence to get rid of awkward punctuation, and that sort of thing. I guess I have ants in my edity-pants.
JW: That’s really helpful to know…thanks!
MP: I’m continually amazed at what people respond to on the Internet! :-) I was dimly aware that there might be some blog etiquette thing from seeing I wrote this I wrote that and UPDATE markup conventions. But my copy of WordPress didn’t come with a handbook. I’ve been holding back declunking my prose all day. Urg! If you’re at SXSW come say hi :-)