I get bored with cover pictures and themes on my web site, Facebook page, and blogs. Tinkering with those is fun. Less fun is keeping the blogroll and other links in the margins up to date. And then there are the old posts.

When I sign on, I notice old posts that are getting a lot of hits. Sometimes I wonder why. Occasionally, I even go out and look at them and find (horrors) that my signature line has an out-of-date link in it, or worse yet that the post has a cover photo of an earlier edition of one of my novels.

If the posts are getting a lot of hits, then that’s where housekeeping is important. Writers who blog hope some of their readers will visit their websites and buy their books. This won’t happen if posts have links to web sites and books that no longer exist.

When blogs focus on events that are ongoing, you can also add updated material or fresh links. I did this a lot with my posts about the White House Boys (notorious school in Florida) and the fate of the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. Both of these were for a while developing stories. You can rewrite the posts, of course, or you can add to them. When you add substantial new information, you can add the word UPDATED to the title.

I don’t delete a lot of old posts, but sometimes it’s good to take a look at them and see if you still feel the way you did when you wrote them. For a writer, this is often like finding old short stories in a file drawer and being a little embarrassed you haven’t thrown them away.

There’s more to do with a blog than meets the eye–just like the attic or the garage in your house.

–Malcolm