“Well,” he said, “a disadvantage of using it is that since each blog post is simply a text file on your server, the last time the file was modified becomes the time stamp on the blog post. So I can’t edit posts after posting them: if I did, the system would decide the post was fresh and put it at the top of the page with today’s date on it.”
“Oh, that would never work for me,” I replied, “I edit my posts continuously. All my posts would have today’s date if my software kept track of my edits like that.”
The subject changed with no further comment than a couple of raised eyebrows from the other bloggers present, but I relished my words as though speaking sacrilege, imagining what such a blog would be like: continuously edited just as memories are.
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patricia
I’m glad to learn I’m not the only one to do this. I’ve only just recently caught up on how strongly some people in the blogosphere feel about editing posts after they’ve been published, and I must say, I don’t get it.
Of course I would love for every entry to be ‘perfect’ when I first hit that save button, but there are times when I check my page and I’m horrified to see a typo or a horribly constructed sentence. After I get over the mortification of knowing people have witnessed the horror, I log in and make the necessary changes. By some people’s standards, I should just let the errors go, but I can’t, and seeing as how it’s my blog after all, I happily don’t have to.
mark
I think it’s the idea of being revisionist, as in, by editing ‘blog postings you’re pretending you always said something different. Not sure I agree with it (especially if your changes are just minor: re-writing a sentence here, fixing a typo there), but the idea of pushing something upon the world and proudly saying “here is what I said/thought/wrote at 00:05 on 20030908, whatever my opinion is now or was beforehand!” has its appeal, especially to those who feel their ‘blogs are how they present themselves. As in, not “this is how I am” but “this is how I was, and that is how I am, and over there you’ll find how I’d like to be…”
Sort of thing.