Do you ever go back and look at your old posts? I do, mainly because even though I moved from Blogger to WordPress years ago, I have yet to finish reformatting all my old posts to the way I like them now. That and the fact that young me was prone to a lot of grammatical issues and poor writing.
Republishing edited old posts has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. None of my older posts get a lot of traffic and if I can barely remember writing a post, I think its safe to assume not a lot of people who have read them, actually remember doing so. It’s not like people will be reading the same thing twice.
There are some posts I’ve written that I thought would do really well and get more pageviews and comments than they actually did. I’m proud of them and feel like the best way for them to get more exposure is simply be republishing them.
There’s also things I want to add to some of my discussion posts. Not enough to warrant a brand new post, but still some thoughts I want to bring up. How am I supposed to do that without writing a whole new post?
And then there’s the fact that opinions change. I loved The Fault in Our Stars and Throne of Glass when I wrote my reviews of them. But after letting my thoughts simmer for a while (I rushed to get both reviews published as soon as I finished the books), I’ve realized my reviews don’t accurately reflect my current opinion of those books. It’s kind of odd to tell people you thought those books were so-so when you rated them so highly. Young me just didn’t know any better (or think things through completely).
And okay, yeah, I’ll admit I’m a little lazy. I really don’t see the point in my reworking a 600 word essay just to tack on some extra 2 cents. I’m also really pressed for time. It’s just simply more efficient for me to edit an old post, add new thoughts and present it as a new post. At least, that’s what I’m assuming.
Everything I mentioned up to this point is valid, but they aren’t the real reason why I’m thinking about recycling old posts. It’s the fact that I’m embarrassed about some of the things I’ve published.
Don’t get me wrong, I can still proudly stand by most of what I’ve written these last few years but some of the posts are just so poorly constructed. Yet, I’m still hesitant to delete them because I know I put in a lot of effort and time in creating most of those posts. Despite my embarrassment, they still mean something to me. They just aren’t as high quality as I want.
What do you think?
Is it okay to republish old posts?
Would you ever do it?
I think it’s perfectly fine to edit or update old posts, especially if you have more to add. I occasionally do that to my Goodreads reviews. If my thoughts or feelings have changed, I’d leave my old review, but add my new opinions as well. I think it’s valuable to note how you’ve grown as a reader and seeing how your opinions change over time. I definitely wouldn’t do it for all of my old posts but certain ones that I feel passionate about, why not?
The entire concept has come to me a few times in the last several months. I’ve written things (also that didn’t get hardly any exposure), and after thinking on it later after seeing more opinions on the matter, I realized I left so much out because I was forcing myself to write a discussion post just to get it out there. Then there are some that I worked excruciatingly hard on that no one ever looked at. I think it’s perfectly OK to upcycle old posts.