Thursday, February 4, 2010

Deleting posts from Google Reader

So, I had a thought. You know how if you delete a blog post, you can never REALLY delete it because it will always be there in Google Reader? This isn't something I do regularly, but I know some people post things and then realize their families can read them or whatever, and want to take them down, but the deleted posts can always be found in Google Reader, even months later.

Well, I've noticed that if you update a blog post, after a little while the updated version shows up in Google Reader, even if the original post was already there.

So, do you see where I'm going with this? I'm thinking that if you regret posting something and decide to take it down... instead of just deleting it, you should edit it. You could even just change the title and text to both say "test," or whatever you wanted. Then, just wait until the updated version shows in Google Reader before deleting the post.

Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

10 comments:

  1. Oooh, interesting idea, Jess. In my case, my family has no idea what a feed reader is. So, if I delete a post, to them it's as good as gone. Don't ruin my secret. =)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've updated a post several times to see it show up in the reader corrected - never used it for the editing purposes, but ya never know. I click "Refresh" if it doesn't update as quickly as I like, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good idea. I actually do that with work documents -- if they are personal. I go in, edit them/erase whatever, then re-save. Then delete.
    :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I always continue to edit my posts after I hit publish- for little things: punctuation, spacing, etc, and you are right the "updated" version shows up in reader.

    One key, I think, is to make sure you don't change the publish date/time. I'm pretty sure this would work, Jess- great idea!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oooh brilliant! I had never even noticed if my updated posts (with corrected spelling/punctuation) were reflected in the reader.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Darn! Wish I'd done this instead of deleting my old blog. Hopefully nothing will come back to haunt me!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Ooh, that's brilliant!

    I have purposely not so much as mentioned the word blog around any family members, much less mentioned that I have one because I might want to write about family stuff at some point, and I don't want to filter myself because family members might be reading. However, I do find that I filter myself on occasion knowing that certain friends might be reading which is less than ideal so this might be a great solution!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ah, you are so smart! I never really think about this, because my family (other than my brothers and some cousins) are so computer illiterate they definitely wouldn't bother with my Blog! I don't put my blog address on my Facebook, so my brother and my cousins don't know it exists and unless I told them, they'd have no clue to even look for it (plus, I change family members names to pseudonyms so it's not like they'd google it and find themselves or something)(even googling my full name doesn't bring up my Blog).

    A few of my real life friends read my Blog, but they don't use Google Reader at all, so even then... meh! But this is good to know, just in case, for the future. LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  9. That is brilliant. I'll store that away for the future.

    ReplyDelete