Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

Excellent news! If you blog about something that you shouldn’t have, and you want it to disappear from Bloglines, here’s what you do.

• Create another post with the exact same title as the offending post
• Edit the timestamp to the same day and time of the offending post
• Fill the body with whatever you want ("…" or "Post removed")
• Post it to your blog
• Watch Bloglines update and breathe a sigh of relief because even though your karma may be bad and your conscience might not be clear, at least you’ve deleted the electronic trail.

Not that I’d know anything about this…

{{Phew!}}

Thanks for the tip. You know who you are.

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Addendum: The tip I described above gets rid of most versions of RSS feeds (approximately 4/5 that Bloglines lists), but it left one feed undeleted. I’m glad I posted this tech tip because Kellan, a local JP blogger who I’d given a tip to recently recently about Amazon Prime, checked his feed and still saw the offending post. Turns out he knows the Bloglines guy and was able to ask him directly.

Here’s what I’ve learned: The important thing when deleting a post from Atom RSS feeds is the exact URL of the original post. This is important information. You may not feel you need it at all, but stick it in your back pocket just in case. Before you go deleting posts from your web page willy nilly (only to leave them there for the world to see in RSS feed histories), write down the full URL. That way you’ll know what WordPress calls the post slug.

When you recreate the replacement post (the one that says something like "nothing to see here"), you will need to edit that post to have the exact same URL as the original post (i.e. the original one you regret).

Now prevention is the best way to deal with something like this, but in a pinch, this will work. I never thought I’d need this information, but I did. Like I said, keep it in your back pocket in the rare instance that you might need it. And pass it on. Friends don’t let friends leave up posts they regret!!

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