kirabug’s idea files

There’s been some talk in the past few months on the web about whether it’s OK to revise your site. I don’t think we’re going to have a Boingboing-level event here, well, in my lifetime, but I believe in transparency and discussion. Just to get it on record so that if some day my readership explodes, here are the general policies around here:

• Typos: I fix ‘em.
• Broken links: If I can fix them, I do. If I can’t, I remove them. When I’ve removed a link, I underline the previously-linked words, and tag the article “broken links stripped out”. (The tagcloud reflects how bad a problem this is currently, as “broken links stripped out” is one of our hottest tags. In fact, that’s why I’m writing this.)

Now here’s the part where we get into dicey territory:

• If a whole post had nothing but a link to an article that’s no longer there, I remove it. Usually we’re talking about articles with one line, and a link — or just a link, and nothing else. It won’t do you any good to read it, and it’s just taking up server space. So I delete those altogether. There’s no getting them back, either. They’re gone.
• If a post has some additional commentary that I think might still add value even with no valid links, or if there’s only one broken link in a set, I generally leave it up.
• The difference between deletion and survival is totally at my whim.

The prevailing thought around the policies above is that you should never ever ever have to visit my site and deal with broken links or any other kind of broken behavior. It’s irresponsible. And it pisses me off to no end when I visit other sites and end up reading posts that look like they’ll be helpful only to find out all the links are broken.

On the other hand, I have a large number of posts and not an infinite amount of time, so I don’t scrub things as often as I could or should.

And here’s the part wherein I disagree with entire sections of the internet:

• If I said something I truly horribly regret and it’s less than 48 hours old, I’ll delete that post and replace it with commentary that says I removed it and why.

Why? How dare I? Because it’s my site and I can. If I cut the words “You suck” into my hair, and then regret it, I have the option to shave my head. Everyone will know I shaved my head, though they might not know the full reason why, and I’m OK with that. It’s my head. If I paint my house puce and then repaint it, the same rules apply. So why should I be held to an arbitrary paper standard that says I can’t unpublish what I’ve already published?

In truth, this has happened once in the 8 years I’ve been blogging. Will it happen again? That depends on whether someone gets me talking about politics again, but I’d like to say it’ll be rare. On the other hand, it’s fair to you, the reader, to know that what you read here today might not be there tomorrow. That’s true everywhere on the Internet, but I’ll at least admit to it.

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