Fixing Up your Blog from Planck's Constant

338-12/4 - Under the hood
Photo by: BigStupidGrin

I spend a few hours every day updating my archived posts. I get a number of emails every week pointing out links that have died, or blogs that have closed shop, or spelling mistakes (although that doesn't happen too often). Sometimes new information requires that I update older articles.

For example, in my initial article on Roy Pearson, the nut job who sued the Korean Dry Cleaners for millions of dollars, there were subsequent trials and conclusions which I thought were important for my readers and so I made three updates, each of which were highlighted with large type and the date of the update.

As far as links that go bad, sometimes it's just a matter of finding out where the website moved the original article. In these cases I simply change the URL in the post to the new address. I do not make a notation that I have fixed the link since it is pointing to what it should have pointed to all along. Likewise when I come across spelling mistakes I will fix them without comment.

The idea here is to make my articles easy to read and as convenient and flawless as possible. Nothing irritates me more than reading an article that links to an URL which returns a 404 error, especially when that URL promises naked photos of especially beautiful women.

Sometimes readers will suggest material to add to existing articles, for example David from Third World County left a comment offering information that I subsequently added to my article For Gods Sake - Stop Helping Africa along with a tip of the turban to David thanking him for the info.

If it turns out that I was mistaken in my opinion I will update the offending piece with a notice clearly stating that I was wrong. For example, in my article As a Muslim I Apologize, I wrote "no Muslim in the world has the honesty to apologize for the barbarity of his religion."

Nine months later, an Arab-American wrote, "that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large." So I wrote an update admitting that perhaps I was wrong. I wrote 'perhaps' because the Arab did not say he was Muslim. But one cannot fault him for that since criticizing Islam is blasphemy and blasphemy is punishable by death, so it is understandable.

As for broken links that cannot be fixed, such as articles that are no longer available on the linked website, in those cases I try to find another source which contains almost the same information so that the link can be replaced with the new one. If the source used to be Reuters for example and I found the same material in a CNN article, I'll obviously change the credit to the new source. I may mention in my article that I had to substitute a new source if it is material to the context.

When I first started blogging, many of my articles were not properly categorized. It wasn't until my 4th article on the Death Penalty that I realized that I should have a category with that tag and so I went back to those articles and added them into that list.

Sometimes archived articles will inspire a newer, updated post on the subject. I have a backlog of about 200 articles that just need a small bit of polishing and eventually I expect to get to them. I don't have the time to wonder what to write about.

I sometimes read posts where bloggers complain they are going through the blahs, that they are burnt out, that they don't know what to write. I suggest that they go back over their old articles and clean them up. There are very few bloggers that couldn't use a good housecleaning now and again.

Certainly bloggers should return to those posts that generate the most traffic and make sure all the photos are perfect, the grammar correct, the spelling appropriate, the links unbroken, and the information accurate.

And while you're reading this, if you see any broken links, misspellings, or whatever - let me know in the comment section.