Rewriting Old (Crappy) Content

 

One of the mildly annoying things about writing articles on the internet and blogging is coming across your old articles that are utter crap. 🙂

Something happened at work yesterday and I responded to the person in question with a few quickly typed notes and thought to myself it would make a reasonable “backfill” type article for the website. Nothing interesting and new, but a useful addition for myself, so I could answer the same question in the future with a link, rather than having to type stuff.

So this morning, before I launched into the “new” article, I did a quick search on my site and that was when I found it. I had already written an article on that functionality, but what I had written couldn’t have been more off the mark if I had tried. We are talking moronic levels of wrongness.

So a few hours later and all the evidence is now gone, except for Google’s cache and the Way Back Machine. I’m not going to tell you which article it was because you will compare them and a little piece of me will die. 🙂

I’ve written about my attitude to rewriting content in my writing tips series. I spend a lot of time rewriting old content. If something is factually incorrect you owe it to potential readers to correct it. It also stops you looking like an incredible Muppet! 🙂

Perhaps this afternoon I will get to do something new for a change. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

4 thoughts on “Rewriting Old (Crappy) Content”

  1. I keep thinking I should review all my old technical content for just the reasons you state.
    But then, the total number of people who look at any of my technical content in a week is probably equal to the number who look at the single wrong article you corrected!
    I should still do it though…

  2. Martin: I typically find them when I’m trying to answer a question, for myself or someone else. I tend to read stuff before I link it, to make sure it’s OK. 🙂

  3. Kurt: The sitemap has the published date, not the update date. The publish date remains very old, even though the article was effectively written at the weekend. 🙂

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