Cool URLs don’t change, but the relevance of my content does (and it’s declining). www.bigsmoke.us consists of content that has mostly never been updated. That’s why I want to move it over to my blog here.

I think one of the advantages of a blog is that it’s quite clear what gets published when. You can add this information to the pages of a good old fashioned static website, but it’s just not quite the same. One of the reasons is that, on my blog, my guideline is that posts are not edited anymore after hitting the “Publish” button.

Why blog posts shouldn’t change what they say

Once a post is published, it can be commented on below the post or from within elsewhere on the world wide web. If, after publication, a post changes significantly, it becomes very unclear what is being cited / commented on. Of course, simple formatting changes or grammar/spelling corrections are not considered significant changes, but changing the meaning of what is being said is.

(Because blog posts are so temporal it is habitual that if you do have to commit corrections which change the meaning of the text, you notify the readers of your post of this by adding an Update notification at the top or the bottom of your post. Examples of this are abound on the web. Here’s one example.)