Comments on: Blog Tip: Update old posts

By: colbert

colbert — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 02:10:01 +0000

good idea. takes a bit of time to scour back though.

By: Jon Gales

Jon Gales — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:22:31 +0000

Chris: That amounts to the same thing I’m talking about. Let’s say a new phone that was announced six months ago now hits a carrier. I’ll make a new post saying that it’s on a carrier (probably somewhere link back to the original story for folks that want to know a little more). Then I’ll go update the older story to let people that stumble there know that it’s really shipping now.

By: Jon Gales

Jon Gales — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:20:15 +0000

Another related tip with this is I also have a “Related stories” section that goes out and grabs other stories on my site that are similar. When I go back and update an old story, it redoes the related stories section at the same time, so odds are any new stuff I wrote about the same topic will be available down there. Same for the new content–it will link to the old. Pretty handy.

By: Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:20:05 +0000

Actually, what I do is change/update the original post and also take the opportunity to shamelessly announce that change in a current posting.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:14:13 +0000

Absolutely, I’m constantly checking my referrers to see what pages are being accessed and updating them with links to the latest info. Anyone who depends on affiliate revenue should be doing this too.

By: Tim Flight

Tim Flight — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:58:37 +0000

Even without a product based site this is an issue. My new blog is a niche news site and I often blog about something more than once as the story develops. If you don’t have time to fully update the old entries I simply trackback to the next most recent post about the topic. (Yes, trackbacking to myself… kinda like talking to myself which I do quite well.)

So in the end someone could view the first post, see the trackback to the next sequential post, and follow the story along. Of course this might not work so well if you have tons of comments and the trackbacks get lost in there, but if you don’t have many comments the story can be easily followed like this.