Ed Blog / The Public Part

Anything Published Is Permanent And Findable

Deletion removes the page, not the copies, the caches or the memory of it.

Publishing is not reversible in the way the delete button implies. Pages are archived, quoted, screenshotted and cached by systems outside your control, and a post that existed for an hour can outlive the site it was on. This is not a reason to avoid publishing. It is a reason to treat the moment of publishing as the decision point, because it is the only point at which you have full control.

The practical implication is a delay. Write the post, then leave it overnight before it goes out. Nothing is lost by waiting and a surprising amount is caught: the sentence that reads as sharper than you meant, the detail that identifies somebody, the confident claim you had not noticed you were making. The overnight reader is a better editor than the writer at the moment of finishing, who is tired and pleased and wants it gone.

Read the draft twice more before it goes: once for the identifying detail, once as though you are the person least sympathetic to you. Ask whether you would be comfortable with the post being read in five years by a student, a colleague or an employer, because all three are plausible. If the answer is yes, publish it and stop worrying. If it is no, the post has told you what to change.