Deleting or editing blog posts

Somewhere along my searching the web I got the strong impression others think it a bad idea to ever edit or delete a blog post, regardless how crappy or irrelevant it is. Here are two quick examples. Rewriting blog history: Bad idea, and Advice: Never delete a blog post. A more balanced view is expressed by Dave Taylor in Should you ever edit or delete blog entries? There are others in a similar vein.

I take a contrarian view of the situation. Elimination is an essential part of every healthy living process, on a micro level.  On a larger system level, everything is recycled and ultimately incorporated somewhere else if it has persistent value, or it is transformed.

Some think of the internet as a historical record, but that is not the way I view it.

Google maintains a site-wide keyword ranking as well as a page-specific keyword rank. I know this is true because Google Webmaster Tools reports these numbers and shows them to me in a graph. Although it is not clear to me how Google uses these site-wide keyword ranking, I know I'm not alone in my ignorance. But sometimes an extraneous series of posts may skew Google site-wide view of my web sites in a keyword direction I don't like. Eliminating the non-focused posts altogether may be the quickest solution to improve search performance, in my opinion.

But, I feel strongly about it. Especially when the abundance of my own verbosity on subject no longer of any interest to me are involved, and when they distort how search engines view the subject matter of my own blogs.  I have also written about it here.

Microblogging standards

In the ancient and arcane world of Usenet, cross-posting was considered by many to be a great sin, and it was usually discouraged.  It was discouraged because it was annoying.  Reading a cross-post was like reading a message from somebody who wasn't really there. Cross-posters generally weren't available for conversation. Cross-posters were not interested in conversation, they were interested in shoveling their message far and wide. Some were so unkind as to call out cross-posters as being "spammers."

The idea of microblogging standards involve the character length limit for microblog posts, and essentially, the ability of various services and platforms to cross-post. These days, cross-posting with blogs is not only encouraged, it is practically a fad.  I have pursued blog syndication myself with some gusto.

A few of the main players in the world of microblogging interoperability standards are found at: ostatus.org, and microblog. See Wikipedia also.

This type of interoperability, or cross-posting as I call it, is something that people donate large sums of money to further. In 2009 the Knight Foundation gave money to design a system that allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a Drupal online news site whose content can be published on Facebook in order to reach an extended social network. - from drupal.org

Syndication - RSS to Twitter, et al. flummox

Automated syndication of RSS feeds to social media platforms is in a state of transition and growth.  Add in the fact that several social media sites are in the midst of transitioning user authentication protocols. These things are a little glitchy, at the moment. As a guy doing things on the cheap (meaning free), I can't really complain all that much.  Except possibly about the fact that I'm interested in testing the actual marketing usefulness of these free services in the social media world, and not so much interested in testing if they work right and issuing ticked-off public bug reports..  Nevertheless, that's the way it is. A lot of it just doesn't work right for now.

First — As of this first week of August, 2010, Ping.com allows one RSS feed to directly connect as an input for its services.  Ping.com is new to this.  The other more commonly accepted method for connecting a RSS feed to Ping.com is through Twitterfeed.com.  Twitterfeed.com is the original Twitterizing service.  Ping.com has been a social media distribution service. I opted for the new untested option and used a Feedburner RSS feed for this Mircoenterprise blog in Ping.com.

Second — Twitterizing services shorten links due to the 140 character limit on Twitter. When Ping.com shortens the link to the original Microenterprise blog, it has a difficult time locating the correct link to shorten in the Blogger - Feedburner RSS feed.  Ping.com only gets it right about half the time, and this is annoying.

Third — So, when I get the bright idea to switch the circuit, and use Twitterfeed.com as an input to Ping.com, like everyone else does, and not have a direct connection between Ping.com and Feedburner, it doesn't work. I don't know why it doesn't work, but every time I try, the setup fails.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, this notice appears on the Twitterfeed.com signup page for Ping.com:

"Please note that Ping.fm have temporarily suspended the use of twitterfeed with their service. Until they re-instate this functionality, we are unfortunately unable to post to Ping.fm."

Fourth — Then I say to hell with Ping.com, and I start moving all the social media connections already established there and take them over to HelloTxt.com.  HelloTxt.com is working perfectly, as far as I can tell, but now the problem is that HelloTxt.com does not support all of the social media platforms I connected with on Ping.com.  One of them is Yahoo! Meme, which is odd.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, the few social media services that I switched from Ping.com to HelloTxt.com are not working . . . yet. Sometimes these things take time.

Therefore, I moved what I could and left the rest on Ping.com.  Ping will get it working soon enough, I hope.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter