Minor annoyance with Planet
Do you know how to fix Planet or WordPress, so when I edit an old post it does not pop back on Planet?
I do edit some of my posts, in particular the Pretty Emacs one, fairly often. I love to have my blog aggregated, but I would hate spamming Planet Ubuntu readers with my old posts. Therefore if I cannot fix this little annoyance, I will have no other choice to remove myself from Planet Ubuntu.
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Chris said,
July 6, 2007 @ 5:07 pm
Are you hitting “save” or “publish” when you finish editing a post?
Chris said,
July 6, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
Nevermind, I’m dumb. :should have googled first:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/80317
If you’re pinging Planet when you update, maybe turn off pings, update, then turn it on again. If it’s pulling from you…I guess talk to the people who run the Planet?
Tristan Rhodes said,
July 6, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
I have the same problem with Blogger! I often want to fix a typo or update a post, but I don’t want to SPAM the Planet.
One solution with wordpress is to have a separate Ubuntu feed using tags. I want to do this but I don’t think blogger supports per-tag feeds.
Tristan
Brett said,
July 6, 2007 @ 5:31 pm
I have the same issue on Planet Python. I basically just don’t update and hope people read the comments.
Alexandre said,
July 6, 2007 @ 5:52 pm
Chris, after a post is published, the publish button goes away. And as far as I know, the only service I ping is pingomatic.
Tristan, I already use a separate Ubuntu feed for Planet Ubuntu.
I think I have nailed the problem. It seems Planet uses the
</updated>tag to find for new posts from Atom feeds (Planet seems to do the right thing with RSS feeds). So the simple solution, would be to change my feed template so the</updated>tag has the same value as the</published>tag. However, the real solution would be to make Planet ignore the</updated>tag. I will see, later tonight, if I can dig through Planet’s source code and get a patch to fix this problem for everyone.Sandy said,
July 6, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
Tristan: Not sure how tags would fix this, but Blogger does support per-tag feeds. Here’s my feed for posts tagged with “gnome”:
http://automorphic.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/gnome
I forget where exactly I saw the documentation for this.
Alexandre said,
July 6, 2007 @ 7:32 pm
I got a fix. It was quite simple after all. I sent the patch to Planet developers, which will, I hope, accept it.
LaserJock said,
July 7, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
Some people might want to have updates shown. If something has been changed then maybe I want to go see it. I don’t think the current behavior is really bad. It is what I would expect. I would suggest if you are often changing a post that maybe you should use a wordpress page for that material rather than a blog post.
Alexandre said,
July 7, 2007 @ 2:59 pm
LaserJock, I understand your point. However, this behavior is really annoying for people like me who tends to post articles first, then fix up the mistakes later (and as I am not a native speaker of English, I do make a lot of mistakes). And from a reader’s point of view, I am not convinced that I would like to see someone’s article appears every time there is a small update.
It is true that I could use a static page instead of blog post, though. The problem is these pages wouldn’t be aggregated in my feed, they wouldn’t allow reader comments to be added, and they wouldn’t be added to my archives page. In other words, I would lose the three features that made me use WordPress in the first place.
Tristan Rhodes said,
July 7, 2007 @ 10:01 pm
Looks like I just ran into this problem! I was preparing to modify my feed by adding tags to my posts. This tiny change caused my posts to appear at the top of the planet again! I’m sorry everyone!
I agree with Alexandre that this behavior should be changed. The planet should not bump posts to the top based on the “updated” value. Bloggers be free to fix a typo without worrying about spamming the planet again.
If a blogger edits a post, the planet should update the content (assuming it is has not rolled off the planet) but it should not change it’s position. If the blogger has an important update that they DO want bump to the top of the planet, they have two options:
Chris said,
July 9, 2007 @ 12:31 am
The bug is not in planet but in your feed software. If you don’t want aggregators to think your feed is updated then ensure that the “updated” time of your feed doesn’t change if you fix a typo.
Complain to Google if Blogger doesn’t support this. Please don’t try to remove a useful feature (the ability to show updated content) from aggregators though.
Edward O'Connor said,
September 18, 2007 @ 4:20 pm
If you’d like, I could add you to Planet Emacsen. Do you have an Emacs-only feed?
Alexandre said,
September 18, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
Sure. The URL of my Emacs-only feed is: /blog/category/computers/emacs/feed/
Edward O'Connor said,
September 18, 2007 @ 5:59 pm
OK; done. Your posts will show up next time the cron job fires.