The “ghost post”
Have you ever gotten something down as a post and thought it was good to go for that day’s postings, and hit publish….only to find that you’ve already posted so much, that you probably should’ve waited until the following day? You know that even when you go back and edit the timestamp for another day, that the posting still shows up in your RSS feed, right?
I call this the ghost post. I recently did it with a posting for today. I actually published it on Friday night, before thinking that I already had too much going on for that day, and decided it should wait for another day.
So, even when someone tries to click-through from the feed to your blog, the ghost post (until it’s published), will show your 404 page. I first saw this on John Chow’s blog, when he did a reviewme for some dating site.
There’s not much you can do to get the post from not showing on your RSS feed, but I look at it like it’s an informational freebie.
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Ghost posts are confusing more than anything else for users. I subscribe to a lot of tshirt printers blogs, and when they accidentally blog a shirt they haven’t released yet it can be frustrating trying to find the details – it’s as if the shirt never existed sometimes.
I hear ya, Steve. It’s a crazy thing when someone hits publish and then goes back and resets the timestamp for another day.