On Being Incomplete And Messy
Leon (not a content marketer) dropped me a line to mention he’d had some thoughts about my public conniption over content marketers editing—or wholesale changing, it seems, in some cases—old posts on the websites they manage through one blogging CMS or another.
It put to mind the fact that while I’m obviously fairly proscriptive when it comes to the editing old posts thing, something I didn’t get into but probably should have is that I actually do have a window of maybe two or three hours after publicly publishing a post where I allow myself to make adjustments.
They don’t tend to be very extreme. Most often (outside of typos, which, I mean, come on those are always fair game) it’s because I suddenly ninety minutes after posting something realize there’s an entire paragraph relevant to the topic at hand that I’d forgotten to include.
So, while I’m stridently against the idea of editing old posts, for the most part, the context of that stridency tends to be this content marketing idea of posts needing to be “evergreen” or else after a time people will stop clicking to read them. This goes hand in hand with me not understanding so-called “blogs” that do everything they can to suppress any public indication of just when they were written.
Leon:
As Bix points out, blogs are a record of our thoughts over time. I’m not writing a “digital garden” as I like the temporality of a blog and the freedom it gives us to explore ideas, even if they’re ultimately a dead end. It really doesn’t bother me if I posted something embarrassing in 2016, or if I was (and probably will be) just plain wrong. Consistency is an overrated virtue.
This continues to be one of the fascinations for me in trying to restore twenty-five years worth of blogging to this bix.blog umbrella (a process which once again is stalled do to my brain simply not issuing the relevant ticket in months), and it’s something I’ve mentioned before when blogging about identity: the question of how many of me will be revealed through that restoration.
I’ve an entire post here, in fact, about editing past selves, which contains snippets of thoughts from a number of other bloggers.
For me it mostly comes down to the issue of transparency: can the reader tell you’ve made changes or not? Obviously, even I have my own exception in that three-hour window after publication. Even then, though, I’m only ever adding something I forgot, and never deleting something I’ve reconsidered. (In at least one case, I think I have used a strikethrough, but never, I don’t believe, without an editorial note.)
What matters to me, I suppose, is that since I believe blogging is about writing yourself info being over time, there’s simply no such thing as a post that needs to be made somehow “evergreen”. Each and every post already is evergreen, in the sense that it will always and forever reflect what you had to say at that moment in time.
If you’ve got something new to say, or a new way to say something you’ve said before, or a new way to look at what you’ve said before, well, you’re writing a web log: there’s always room for that next, new entry.