1. People already know what you said. One of the worst reasons you could delete a blog post is regretting your words after you publish. First of all, if you’re going to bother with regret, after publishing is too late. Think before you post. Once it’s out there in feed readers, email inboxes, etc., there’s no going back. People have seen what you’ve said anyway, and you do nothing but make yourself look like either a hypocrite or someone with something to hide. If you’ve changed your mind, edit the post and say so (strikethrough the previous information for example, but don’t hide things). If you realize you screwed up, then edit the post and own up to it. Apologize if it’s necessary, and just move on. It’s far more respectable.
2. Nothing on the Web is ever completely deleted. It doesn’t matter that you deleted the post from your blog. It’s still probably cached in search engines. It was probably in feed readers. It might be in the Internet Archive for all you know. It’s very likely in the email box of some subscribers (anyone can subscribe to your feed via email and have a permanent record of your post, whether or not you personally enable email subscriptions). Again, you just look like you have something to hide, and you never know when it could come back and bite you on the ass (all it takes is for one reader to call you out on it for a simple deletion to turn into major drama for you — not worth it).
3. Your blog posts show your progression. It’s okay to change your mind over time. We all learn new things and have new experiences that might influence our opinions on an issue. That doesn’t mean you should go back and delete old posts sharing old opinions because you’re afraid you look hypocritical. Instead take it as an opportunity to connect with your readers. Let them get to know you better by sharing your thought process. What made you change your mind? You’ll have more positive influence by justifying what you’re telling readers than by simply flip-flopping. Don’t understimate people’s memories. Just because you delete a post, it doesn’t mean your readers don’t remember the views you shared.

There are certainly exceptions to the rule. While I’ve very rarely deleted anything from my blogs, here are a few cases where I did, and why:

1. When I merged two writing blogs, there were some overlapping posts. They were literally copy / paste — things I’d cross-published (like a product launch announcement). So I would delete one while leaving the other. Basically I was just keeping one copy of a post rather than having two copies in the archives.
2. When SixFigureWriters.com (a group blog) became AllFreelanceWriting.com (a solo blog at the time), I removed posts from the other writers if they wanted me to. I wasn’t going to move on and profit from their posts, and some had their own writing blogs where they could put the content to use. Because it was a team effort for a jointly-run blog rather than my blog where I was hiring writers (like now), it came down to respecting author rights. That said, I don’t expect that I’d be a part of that kind of model again (not that it wasn’t a lot of fun at the time — it was).
3. There was one post on my PR blog that had to be removed because it attracted an insane amount of “undesirable” traffic. I don’t mean attracting people who disagreed with me or anything — I don’t mind that in the slightest. I mean the porn variety. For some reason links to this particular article were all over adult sites, I was getting tons of inappropriate comments to moderate, and plenty of spam to boot. It was at the point where the administrative time needed to manage issues with that one post exceeded administrative time for the rest of the blog as a whole. The post wasn’t important in any way — pretty generic for that blog as it was — so I opted to kill the piece rather than devote the time to something that was pretty much invisible to my actual readers anyway.

In most cases there are other ways to deal with things you wish you hadn’t posted. For example, if you reviewed a product positively and it was updated (and you think it’s awful), it’s okay to go back and edit your original review with a new opening or an end note saying this is an archived review of an older version and your feelings have changed. If you don’t want to do anything to promote a certain person anymore, go through your post and delete or nofollow their links instead of deleting the posts. If you simply have a “Whoops!” moment and you realize you were unintentionally offensive, just edit the post and add a quick apology and / or disclaimer to clarify what you meant.

What about you? Have you seen your favorite bloggers deleting posts? What crosses your mind when you see it happen? What would it take for you to be able to justify deleting your own posts from your blog? When does deleting blog posts cross a line?

I’ve been asked a few times privately how I can have a separate RSS feed for the freelance writing jobs here at All Freelance Writing. More specifically, how the gigs not only have their own feed, but can also be removed from the primary blog feed. It’s surprisingly simple to do, and I hope others will find it useful. (Note: This is for self-hosted WordPress blogs–I don’t know if it works for WordPress.com blogs.)

How to Remove a Category from Your RSS Feed

First let’s figure out how to remove a feed (here the jobs feed) from your main RSS feed.

Your main RSS feed with WordPress will vary a bit depending on the theme you’re using. For this blog, it is http://allfreelancewriting.com/feed

To remove a category, you would go to your WordPress admin area and visit the category list. Mouse over (but don’t click) the name of the category you want to exclude from your main feed. Look at the URL in your status bar as you do this (the bar at the bottom of your browser). You’ll see id=xx at the end of that URL. That xx is your category number. In my case, the category number of the jobs section is 263.

All I have to do now is create a modified URL based on the original feed URL. It will look like this: http://allfreelancewriting.com/feed?cat=-263

You can then use that new URL anywhere you please – such as in place of the original URL in your theme files or in your feedburner account (which is what I do, and the original URL redirects to the feedburner one).

Now what if you want to eliminate more than one category? That’s actually what I do here – I remove the job listings, the writer’s markets, and the parent “freelance writing jobs” categories from the main feed, as they have their own. Here’s what it looks like with all three removed: http://allfreelancewriting.com/feed?cat=-11&cat=-123&cat=-263

How to Create an RSS Feed for a WordPress Category

Now that the job listings are removed from the original RSS feed, I want to setup a separate feed just for that category (in this case using the parent freelance writing jobs category so it includes both job postings and writer’s markets). Here’s what that would look like: http://allfreelancewriting.com/freelancewriting/freelance-writing-jobs/feed/

See how easy that part is? Neat, huh? All you had to do was get your category URL and add /feed/ to the end of it. Now I won’t guarantee that there’s some theme out there with wonky feed settings where this won’t work, but I tested it on several of my WordPress blogs, and it worked every time.

Reasons to Separate Feeds

There are several reasons you might want to consider separating your feeds (or even a single feed).

For example, here on All Freelance Writing, there used to be two blogs. The jobs were on another blog entirely. When they were combined, I needed a way to let people keep their job feed (getting writing jobs daily via email), but without forcing them to subscribe to all of the other blog content. This was a simple solution that made the blog merge possible.

Another example would be for “special” categories. For example, I’ll be creating a new category and related RSS feed when we have our next 14 day e-book writing challenge here later this year. Regular readers won’t have to see those daily posts in their feed, and people following the challenge will be able to subscribe to stay on track.

You could do something similar with an online course. You could even make it available by e-mail only (not visible on the main blog / homepage by removing the category in your templates there – not too complicated, but that can be for another time). So in other words, you promote the course, get people to register, and then they can follow along with you after “registering” by subscribing.

You could also use this strategy if you wanted to setup a category for each author of a multi-author blog (which can be hidden from the main category list on the blog, but still accessible via direct link). You could create individual feeds easily (so they could use it elsewhere to promote their recent content), or you could publish feeds in smaller groups (imagine a content network on a blog platform – you could have a feed for the “Home and Garden” bloggers collectively and another for the “Business and Finance” bloggers for example).

There are plenty of reasons to want to eliminate categories from your RSS feeds as well. For instance, you may have a category that has an unusually high number of posts (maybe you post quick blurbs and a link to industry news). It might overwhelm subscribers if they have 10 of those updates per day, and some longer content-rich posts mixed in. Removing the news posts gives them just the meat of your blog content.

Being able to manipulate your RSS feed(s) quickly and easily can be beneficial for a number of reasons. I hope these tips help a few folks looking to gain a bit of added control over how their content is presented and how it’s offered to subscribers.