I don’t love 2006, or at least, no more than I love any other year from the past, but it was brought to my attention yesterday that the “feed” for this blog (I don’t really know what a feed is, but I know there is one) has – of late – been clogged with seemingly random old posts from 2006. I know why, but I don’t know why, so if someone can help me with this, I’d be grateful:
For some reason, when I switched servers a couple of years ago, a whole load of pictures I’d posted to accompany some of my older blog posts disappeared. So, occasionally, I’ll randomly dip into the archive and reinstate the pictures. While doing this, I also neaten up the comments sections. Another bizarre thing: when migrating this blog to WordPress from Blogger even more years ago, only about three quarters of the comments were transferred across. So I migrated the whole thing again, and, in many cases, each comment now appears twice. This is annoying. I know for a fact that very few people read those old blog entries, but I am nothing if not a perfectionist, so – occasionally – I delve back in to remove the duplicate comments, too. (Three of the random pics I’ve recently reinstated are lined up above. Yes, pretty random.)
Anyway, when you do this, you have to press UPDATE (where you would normally press PUBLISH on a new post). Seemingly, this announces the old posts on my “feed” as if they are new.
This must be annoying for those who follow me via “feed.” Anybody clever know how I can update old posts without fanfaring the fact?
It doesn’t matter if not. None of this really matters that much. I’ve not even had my breakfast yet.
Oh, and if you want to explain what a “feed” is for, I’d like that, too.
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 
Oh God, not this post again 😉
A feed from your Blog to my Google Reader (other RSS/Feed Readers are available) enables me to read all of my favourite blogs in one place – I don’t have to check multiple sites to see when there are updates I just go to Google Reader and it shows me how many unread posts I have.
Can’t help with your publishing issue though.
Someone already explained the ‘feed’ thing. This seems like the work around to not reposting old posts to your feed – http://is.gd/5zogkC – hope it helps.
Thanks for this, although as the guy says, it is a fudge rather than a solution. (You have to switch to PRIVATE while updating old posts, then switch back to PUBLIC when you’re done.)
Similar to the commenter above, I get your blogs in my wordpress reader, no 2006 ones have turned up there, but it is a feed. Have you been getting lots of unintelligible spam comments lately? There seems to have been an increase over the last few days.
Good to hear.
I use a spam filter (which unfortunately also filters out anybody posting using a hotmail or gmail account, but I weed those out and publish manually), so don’t notice spam.
A feed is a way of being updated with your blogs without having to go and check there is a new one. Mine feeds directly into my work outlook account, which means I can read your stuff at my leisure on coffee/lunch breaks.
For a couple of weeks over christmas/new year it was broken, and I really missed them. But now thankfully they are back!!
On a separate issue, is there a cutoff point beyond which we can’t reply to any of the old posts?