You can see this post perfectly normally on my main blog page. But for those who read my blog via Bloglines, it should be hidden. Those RSS-reading blogfeeders hopefully won't spot it at all. Ha! (Yes, I'm just trying to prove a point)
I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago. The date was Saturday 24th June, to be precise. Back then I only wrote the first line of my post, then saved what I'd written as a draft. And now this morning I've written the rest of the post, and published it. And all of you reading on diamondgeezer.blogspot.com can read it perfectly. Nothing surprising there. Except that those of you reading my blogfeed via Bloglines shouldn't be seeing this post at all. However did I make that happen?
Note to those of you who don't know what Bloglines is. Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for browsing weblogs and other news feeds. With a blogfeed like Bloglines you don't have to read my blog, or anybody else's blog, you just let Bloglines collect all our posts and you can read them all there instead. I know there's at least 110 people reading my blog via Bloglines. They don't get my sidebar, and they don't get your comments, but they do get all my posts. Very convenient it is too. Look, here's a public Bloglines account I set up earlier, just so you can all see how it works. Click on the feed on the left, OK?
If you were looking for my latest post on Bloglines, you'd look at the top of the page, wouldn't you? This post should appear just above yesterday's post, because that's common sense, that is. But today's post isn't there at the top of the page. How have I hidden it away, out of sight?
Well, it's like this. By default Blogger timestamps every new post with the date I start writing it, not the date it's posted. So before I posted today's post I had to change its date from "24th June" to "5th July", because that's the date I wanted to publish it. The problem is that Bloglines still treats this as a "24th June" post. It doesn't, indeed can't, change the date of the post like I can. So this post doesn't appear at the top of the blogfeed page, oh no, it appears 11 days further down. And nobody in their right mind is going to look 11 days down a big long page for a new post, are they? It might as well not be there.
Think of it as a clever disappearing trick. Or think of it as very annoying. I can't guarantee that Bloglines readers always view my blog in the way that I choose. And they can't guarantee that they're seeing everything I've posted in the order I posted it. Still, their loss.
But there's another problem with Bloglines' bungling newsfeeds, because this isn't my only post today. I posted something else on my blog which you can't see, because it's only visible to readers on Bloglines. If you want to discover how I managed to keep it a secret, and read it for yourself, then you'll have to read it on Bloglines instead. Artificial RSS-fuelled comments-free web digests can be dead useful sometimes. But the perfect diamond geezer experience is right here.
Update: OK, so experiment 1 didn't work very well. Bloglines users can see this post, probably just the first time they check for updates, even if it disappears down the page later. But experiment 2 worked perfectly, which is rather worrying. You have spotted experiment 2, haven't you?
