Blasts from the past

From today, I'm allowing subscriptions to another feed (we love choices, don't we? :)). With the latest buzz being piping our existing feed and re-order them by published date, I think one (annoying but) good aspect of Blogger's native way of handling feeds got overlooked. But a brief history.

How we used to do it

In the old Blogger, the feed wouldn't be altered if you edited a post from your archives, like it does in the new Blogger. Mostly, edits used to be typos, or little bits of added information. These updates didn't need the posts in the feed jumping around. However, sometime later, someone discovered the RSS feed which would be sorted by the 'Updated' date, and not 'Published' date. Steve and I came up with a 'Recently Updated Posts' widget (weren't called widgets back then) for the sidebar. That was when we had a choice between the two feeds.

The primary (ATOM) would be sorted by published order, and secondary (RSS) would reflect the updated order. All was goood.

What we do now

Now, all the feeds are sorted by 'Updated' date. This is good only if you are like Phydeaux3 who doesn't touch his posts once they've gone into your archives, unless there is a major update. It's actually the best, because then a major update brings the post back into focus. However, we have been spoilt.

We (well, I atleast do) still edit old posts if we find a typo, and that minor change makes the post jump right to the top and show up as new. That can be very irritating, because an old post might show up above a post which you just posted, and hence may steal focus away. I'm trying to change that habit though, and I guess we all will have to at some point of time, unless Google opens the Blogger feeds to all the GData queries. The Pipes method does exist though, and that's what I use as my primary feed.

But I'd like to leave the decision to you. So what happens now is that I offer two separate feeds - one ordered by the 'Updated' date (the new one), and the old one is still ordered by the 'Published' date - and you can pick which one you want to subscribe to, as per your convenience. You can subscribe from the icon in the address bar, or the syndications list at the bottom (I just love choices!). You can subscribe to both too, if you want to be extra generous and give a slight boost to my readership counts! :)

Happy weekend!