My question is for you all who use RSS feeds...
Does my post show up every time I make a change? If I go back six times in an hour, do you get all six versions? Or does your RSS filter that sort of nonsense?
Yeesh. It sure would be annoying to get the same post eleven times in a row!
Just wondering...
Rachael
This question was written by RACHAEL from FRESH APPROACH COOKING
23 comments:
I was wondering the same thing after a recent post. It was my first with photos and my friend who was helping me suggested using Picassa which I did. It was only a draft, but I couldn't find a save draft button, so published to blogger, then saved as a draft from there. A reader emailed me to ask where the post was when it showed up on her RSS feed, but when she came to the site to leave a comment, nothing was there.
I can't speak for all RSS services, but as for bloglines:
1) If you make the change relatively quickly after you first post (5 minutes or so) it doesn't show up twice in bloglines. At least, when I make changes that way, they don't.
2) If someone does make a change later on and it get's posted again in bloglines, it really doesn't bug me personally. I can quickly see it's something I've read before and ignore it. I guess I sometimes have (extremely) mild disappointment if it's a blogger I really like and was hoping for another post from them to entertain me instead of doing work!
It doesn't bother me if it happens once or twice per post. I prefer when folks fix typos that they use the strikethrough code so I know what's different (especially if someone's pointed out the error in the comments). Other times I'll just add an adendum of "UPDATE" at the end to include new info or correct earlier info so people know why it's showed up again.
Sometimes I'll wait until the post has dropped of my page to make other changes (like realigning a photo or changing a list of things into a bulleted list).
If you're really worried about it, make a pledge to yourself that you'll only make one change to it and then read the post VERY carefully and test all the links before fixing things.
You also might want to make a change to your feed that it only pings the feed when you're happy with it. I manually ping sometimes just because I want to preview a long or complicated post.
also blogline users (as I understand it from one of them) have the option (I believe) of turning OFF the ability for the post to appear in the feed everytime it is slightly tweaked.
Like Rachael, I would much prefer it if blogline readers would do that. I hate being watched as I fix my typos and bad links and screwy alighnments.
Although Cybele has a good point, things don't work out the way always, for me.
the posts only turn up the once in gooogle's reader which is what I use.
So Sam,
does that mean that only the original (typo riddled) version shows up in your reader? Thats too bad. I (obviously) would prefer the fixed version shows. Oh well.
Also, if I go and fix a post from a few years back, does that show up? (I did that recently when I added a picture to a post that didnt have one...)
with googles reader i reckon you have about 10 or 20 minutes in which to change the typos before the post pops up.
i have never seen one of your old posts appear in my reader. but then i might not know.
if you change the actual title (risky if you have inccoming links to it) then it might re-ping.
Only posts that are on your current page will show up in your feed again. So if you fix something from two days ago (I don't know how many you keep on your home page) it'll pop up as new again.
That's why I often wait a week until it's fallen off the front page to fix something like a photo alignment or other aesthic issue.
I know that you can turn off updates on bloglines, but so many people use the refeeding of existing posts to correct or add information that I really don't pay enough attention to which feeds I should do that to.
That said, I've never been so irritated to the point that I would drop the feed.
sam -- i remember seeing that supposedly bloglines users can change that setting -- but either the instructions i were given weren't correct or i'm too stupid to figure it out... but i've never been able to get that function to work. ;)
In my reader - a very no-frills program called SharpReader - changed posts show up in Italics rather than as new, so I can see that they are indeed not new posts, just changed ones. What *is* annoying is that sometimes unchanged posts will show up in Italics too - and I can't really figure out why - but that's not a huge problem.
Also, it won't show multiple versions, just the latest version. So, if you were to change it five times, I'd have to be logged in and reading those five times, in order to see all.
I use Bloglines, and there are a few blogs I subscribe to where I notice the same posts showing up over and over. Rachel, I subscribe to your blog and it's not one of them that' I've noticed this, so not to worry.
but mine probably is - i can never see the typos until i publish the post.
I even spelt the name of the champagne i wrote about today incorrectly - how duh is that?
thankfully a lovely fellow FBS member pointed it out to me privately but i guess the rest of you were all having a laugh about my idiocy in private ;)
I think you should ALL SWITCH TO GOOGLE's reader immediately!!!
Bloglines Users: When you subscribe to a blog, under Updated Items click "ignore" to avoid getting duplicate posts.
You can also control how much of a post displays in the reader by choosing "summary" or "complete post" or "titles only". Whether this actually happens is also affected by how much content the blogger SENDS to the feed reader ...
... and as an avid blog watcher (thanks only to the amazing capabilities of an RSS reader ...) I'd like to encourage everyone to send full feeds rather than summary posts. I know you want to count the traffic. But unless your traffic actually counts (as in you're getting enough clicks/etc from advertising that it's worth it) or that yours is a really-really favorite blog, please know that it's far more time consuming for the reader, you're less likely to be read at all. (I've even started keeping blogs with abbreviated posts in a special folder and I get to them on occasion but certainly not regularly.)
Bloglines Users: You can also click "edit subscription" on each feed and change these settings.
Sam, LOL, but yours hasn't bugged me either, so I guess it must not be that often!! So don't worry about it. Alanna, thanks for the editing suggestions, which I plan to use.
Right now Blogger has a serious problem with saving drafts. I wish they would fix that. The problem has me tweaking more than I'd like. because sometimes you just can't tell how that line spacing is going to turn out until its up. Etc.
Thanks for the advice about what kind of tweaks are going to cause it to feed through again.
I do this too, and I had no idea that it would be an issue becasue I had no idea that some readers actually carry content - I thought they just carried links! I guess I have a lot to learn. I am constantly tweaking and correcting typos and language issues, because I'm a frustrated copywriter. I don't think I have any bloglines subscribers yet but it's good to know that this stuff shows up in newsreaders.
Alice - you have 14 bloglines subscribers and you are sending through partial/abbreviated posts.
Alice I'm subscribing to you in Bloglines, surprise!!
What? You guys must be suffering then, because I edit every post like twenty five times after I publish it - is it a pain?? I can try to proof them better before posting, I wouldn't want you to have to read all that - but like Sam, I never see the typos until it's published. I'm the same way about written documents, I can't see typos until they print - I'm weird that way. I wonder how come feedburner doesn't count bloglines subscribers? According to them I only have six subscribers total, and one of them is me! Shows you how much I know !
Alice: No, your edits are no pain at all because I use the Bloglines setting on your blog (and all others) set on "ignore updates". That said, I'm likely seeing your unedited version if Bloglines picks up your new post as fast as it does my own (within 2-3min as best I can tell). If it's formatting, no trouble. If it's grammar, spelling etc ... that's what I (and the other subscribers) see. Even if you don't WANT to use Bloglines (and the other readers) regularly, it's worth signing up just to see what your own blog looks like, coming through, like testing IE and Firefox, both.
Oh, no! I didn't realise this is how it works. I don't have means of saving drafts on my platform and it does bug me all the time that i have to load and reload if i am to attach an image for it to come up on the page instead of link information only. It's complicated.
Like others, i spot spelling mistakes after i post even though i've read and re-read it already. You see, English is my second language and i'm always concern about my bad grammar, spelling and tone. Writing doesn't come easy for me. But i can cook my heart out.
Just a continuation to my comment above..,
I sincerely apologise to anyone who subscribe to my feed [if any at all :-)] for being so stupid and having to re-load.
I hope you won't get fed up with me :)
I think its a bummer people never see my updated posts...the updates are to fix problems, but also to add info...oh well.
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