Google Mail has this thing now. If you write an email complaining about your boss, only you end up sending it to him, instead of to your buddy (let’s pretty they’re both named Tristan), you’ve got 30 seconds in which to claw it back. It’s pretty cool. If you’re quick enough that is. (I’m not). And the best thing is that he would never need to know you sent it.
WordPress allows you to do the same thing, with blogs. Say you’re totally pissed off and you just have to write about it. So you do. And then, after having posted it, you decide that in complaining publicly you’ve just broken your own cardinal rule, which is that you’re not allowed to whine. Well then, you can just go back and either put the blog back in “draft” mode until you can think of a better way to handle it, or you can just delete it.
It’s pretty cool, really.
Except…..well the moment you publish the damned thing, an email goes out to all of your subscribers, gleefully announcing that the whiny bitch blog is up, and they should come read it.
Only they click on the link, only to get a 404 error. (That’s the error that says “oops. You probably spelt the URL wrong. At any rate you’ve come to the wrong place. Now go away.”)
This is what happened last night.
I wrote a blog called “When Is It OK To Say It’s ‘Hammertime?'”. Then, after reading it again, I discovered it had no redeeming value. So I took it down. I mean, the subject of that regrettable blog still has me pissed off, but I’ll deal with it.
This is a rare experience. Usually, if I’m unsure about a blog, I’ll post it to the draft folder and no one gets notified that it’s there, or pending. I rarely claw back blogs like that.
Which is to say “I’m sorry”. I know that many of you got notified about a new blog, and you came here expecting to read something entertaining, only to run into the 404 wall.
It probably won’t happen again.
View from a Wolf 