I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a while now- must content expire? I think that we (bloggers) do ourselves a terrible disservice with the whole date-based archive deal, but there doesn’t seem to be a way around it yet.

My first problem: I want to attract an audience. So how do you do it? Good content. But there’s this temptation to hold onto your best stuff and wait for a bigger readership (don’t get all “I just blog for the fun of it.” there’s an attention whore in you, me and all the rest of the blogoshpere. deny that and we all know you’re a big fat liar). But does expiration even have to be an issue?

Once you have an audience, can you just pull that stuff off the shelf, dust it off and re-post it? I’m curious about the reception that would receive from the readers. The Sneeze solves this by changing the date on posts so he can recycle his content, but that would mess up the chronology of the archives. I see Tony Pierce and others mention past posts of their own, and this refreshes the content somewhat, but we need a simple, automated, and understandable method. Not something we each must rig up.

Secondly, and I have mentioned this before, there should be a simple way to connect similar posts between blogs. Face it- hardly anyone understands trackbacks. We might as well get rid of them unless someone decides to start explaining them and making them easier to use. I’d love to be able to like a post i see on your site to one i did (earlier) on mine. The conversations will continue and weave throughout the blogosphere and keep our content relevant and fresh.

The only automated attempt at a solution that I have managed so far has been developing several categories and linking whatever categories a post belongs to at the bottom of the page.

I don’t think content should expire. I think we cheat ourselves on accident by allowing it to. I bring up the same stuff in conversation a lot. Heidi even has this code for showing me when I’ve told a story 5 or more times. If anyone has a solution for this, incorporate it into a blogging tool and you know you have at least one person who will jump on it. Until then I’ll just keep linking to this, changing it’s date, copying it and pasting it, or if all that fails maybe resorting to comment spamming. That last one was just a funny. Please don’t kill me.

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