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Ask HN: How do you release new versions of your blog posts?
I started to blog ~6 months ago. By now, I have some posts that people actually read, I have been on the front page of HN once.
Some of these posts have been a lot of work and contain many subsections. Recently, I have found that I would like to extend some sections within these posts or update them with new information. However, if I just update in-place without changing the post's date, it feels not quite right. Updating the post's date to now() also seems far from ideal.
Admittedly, I would like my additional work to be rewarded with some additional views. People who have liked the original post would likely want to be aware of the updates somehow. However, I do not want to engage in unfair SEO tactics and just re-release my posts all the time.
So how do you handle this with your own blogs? Do you just update the post? Do you change the post's date? Do you release an additional post and mention that there is an earlier version (e.g. My Post V2)?
- karlicoss 7y agoThought about it as well. For my static blog, I just want to expose history of changes for each post (all my stuff is tracked by git). Haven't got onto implementing that yet though. I've only done relatively small changes so far, so hopefully that is fair to people who already shared/liked. For typos/style I just change it, for bigger additions, I'll explicitly mention when it's updated.
- tkainrad 7y agoThanks for your input. Having an automated way of exposing changes seems like a great idea. I am just not so sure If I am happy with the respective post still showing up at the bottom of my /posts page because the original date remains.
- vasco 7y ago1. Make a new post quoting the old post with whatever new findings you have. 2. On the old post, add links to the newer posts with a short note like "27/11/2019: I've since found a better way of doing this, check it out"
- tkainrad 7y agoWhat kind of changes do you think would warrant a new post? Does it make sense to write a new post if only one out of many sections is rewritten? Or do you mean to somehow make a new post with only the new information and link to the old one for the rest?
- jjjbokma 7y agoI have divided my site in blog and articles. The latter I can update whenever I want. For the former, see the excellent advice of user vasco.
- tkainrad 7y agoI kinda like making blog posts, partly because of the rewarding feeling of getting to release new posts. Updating articles would probably not be as rewarding. Still, I like the concept and will think about it. E.g. I have a long post about setting up a Linux Workstation for Software Development that needs constant improvement and should probably be more of an article.
- billconan 7y agoMy blog (https://epiphany.pub https://epiphany.pub) supports version control, like GitHub. Each post has a creation date and a last update date. People can see the update history, there is a revision button at the bottom of each post.
- eivarv 7y agoUpdate post (and add/update "last-updated"-field).