Thursday, October 14, 2010

Blogger blunders: posting, oops... editing and re-posting

Stargazer from Boondocking Blogger posted an apology to her readers, explaining that she found a misspelled word on a previous post and made a correction, not realizing this made the post come up on her readers' lists as a new post.  You can go to her Blog for a better explanation.  This was my comment to her:

"Thank you for an interesting post - I didn't realize each edit causes a post to appear again and again to our followers as if it is a NEW post.  I sometimes find little things in my posts and make corrections.  Probably driving my followers crazy, and I didn't even know it. Live and Learn! "

Last month I had a problem with some information not formatting correctly, and the line spacing was all screwed up.  They were the posts about the many ages of a woman, the Captain Underpants post, and maybe another one.  I had saved that information previously in other programs and was doing a "cut and paste" into my post. Then I added to it, and published.

I have lots of old files of interesting or funny things I've saved through the years.  A couple of times when I've purchased a new computer, I saved documents on CD's (before thumb drives, etc.) and have them filed in my desk.   One day I was going through some of the old CD's and found things I had forgotten about.  I really enjoyed re-reading some of them, they brought back memories of times and places in the past.  I decided to use a few of them in those posts.

So, anyway, I was really frustrated, because they looked fine as I was putting them together and then when I'd hit Publish Post and check them, again they were spaced wrong.  I didn't know why they were formatted wrong.  I'd change the spacing in the edit mode and publish it again.

One of my readers commented that my blog appeared four times, but I didn't realize what she was talking about. Now I know.  I thought it was appearing after itself, four times in a row, but now I think she meant she was being notified over and over that I had a new post.  And it was the same each time.

So, I guess I should offer my apologies to anyone who has clicked on my blog thinking a new post is ready, only to find the same one they have already read.

I did finally find out later when an "Aha Moment" happened that if you take text that's formatted in a different program, it might look okay, but you have to take the formatting out, and re-format it to fit the program  it's going into.  Someone I know had some line spacing difficulties on her professional website, and when I figured out why I was having problems, I e-mailed her and she was able to fix her spacing problems, too.

You would think posting something every day would be pretty simple, but I keep learning new things.  I guess it's obvious, just not something I thought about, that it would re-post as if its new.  I'm going to need to make sure I do all my edits before I hit the Publish Post button.  And check it out on "Preview" too!

Do you ever find a misspelling or something you need to change, do an edit and re-publish?

That's it for today.  Thanks again, Stargazer.  It's always nice to learn something new, especially when it stops me from making the same mistakes in the future.  And - sorry for the misspelled word in my comment. : (   I'll have to start using the Preview function there, too!

From Me and My Dog, have a great day, everyone!  : ) 
(Hitting PUBLISH POST now...)

8 comments:

  1. Wow! I do that ALL the time. I proofread my entry before I publish it, sometimes reading it over several times. Invariably when it's published and I view the blog I find a little spelling or grammatical error I missed, so I edit and hit publish again. I had no idea it appeared as new every time.

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  2. Thanks for letting us know, Barbara!

    I re-edit my posts all the times, too! How embarrassing!

    Being an programing developer, I have to say it's a design flaw!

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  3. Me too!! To all of the above. Live and learn... Thanks for the great info. Stay safe..

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  4. I'm SOOOOO glad I'm not the only one who does this. I do exactly the same thing - there is always something I see once it's posted that I need to change.
    Well -- if anyone knows otherwise, please let us know. This blogging is definitely a learning experience for me, but I love it! :) (And if you need to make a change, I won't care at all.)
    Barbara

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  5. Hi Barbara... I think there something else going on here. Simply correcting errors and republishing your blog will not normally send out any new messages. The only time a new message should be sent out is when a 'new' post is published.

    Like others have said, I edit and republish my posts all the time and I've never had a problem. This is a pretty standard practice with bloggers and it works just fine.

    Was there something else going on with this blogger who said she got 4 notices? Seems strange.

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  6. I leave comments and then read them again after they published sometimes and see I've written the wrong word. I always feel like a real dunce.

    I edit and republish my own posts sometimes and haven't had that issue you mentioned. But then, I'm a dunce with all of that too. :)

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  7. I do that all the time too - I didn't know they would repost. Well, now that we know, we can just forgive each other for our imperfections. :-)

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