Meaningful Updates for Blog Posts

Have you ever posted a blog entry, read it back to yourself, and found that you made some errors? Happens every day to most people!

I was listening to Tantek Çelik’s talk at WE05 entitled Meaningful XHTML and he talked about a meaningful way to update your blog posts.

The basic ideas is this: instead of updating a post by going in, editing, and then saving, Tantek recommends using semantic markup to show what has been updated.

The roots of this idea are in the trust and accountability of blogs and bloggers: once it’s posted, it stays. It goes along with the idea of permalinks, which are truly intended to be “permanent links”. If you use them what you are really saying is: this is up here and I am going to take responsibility for it.

Mistakes and errors occur often, of course. How to show that you aren’t changing the original post except to update it’s content? When you update the blog post, simply wrap the old content in <del></del> and wrap the new content in <ins></ins>.

Then apply some CSS (for example):

p ins,p del { display:inline }
ins {
  background-color: #ffc;
  font-weight: bold;
  text-decoration: none;
}
del {
  text-decoration:line-through;
  color: #999;
}

If you did this on my site, this is what an updated post would look like:

AJ took a great picture of a Monarch Queen butterfly in Arizona this week.

The blog post doesn’t change, it just gets updated with new information. I love that Tantek brought this up in his podcast because I haven’t been good myself at putting this into practice.

It’s a great idea because it not only reinforces using semantic markup but also helps promote honest and responsible blogging practices.

If you are interested in hearing his whole talk, go to the WE05 podcast page and download the audio file there. Then link to the slides (see above), listen, learn, and enjoy!