Updated for MT 3.1

If a blog, or any online publication for that matter, is going to have any sort of decent reputation, the author(s) must have the integrity to publicly correct any incorrect information that they’ve published. We all make mistakes, whether they be typos or actual factual errors, and it is often necessary to re-edit or change the content on our sites. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of the web over traditional print media. There is no need to publish an errata list, you can simply modify the original.

However, it is also important to acknowledge the mistake and not just silently update the text and act as if the change had always been there. If the change is simply correcting a misspelling, this may be alright, but for correcting factual errors, it must be stated that a change has occurred, as people may quote you before the change, and you will be making them out to be liars. Also, it’s simply a matter of integrity to publicly state "I made a mistake, I have now corrected it"

Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, has this to say on the matter:

If you find that you have linked to a story that was untrue, make a note of it and link to a more accurate report. If one of your own statements proves to be inaccurate, note your misstatement and the truth. Ideally, these corrections would appear in the most current version of your weblog and as an added note to the original entry. (Remember that search engines will pull up entries without regard to when they were posted; once an entry exists in your archives, it may continue to spread an untruth even if you corrected the information a few days later.) If you aren’t willing to add a correction to previous entries, at least note it in a later post.

One clear method of denoting a correction is the one employed by Cory Doctorow, one of the contributors to the Boing Boing weblog. He strikes through any erroneous information and adds the corrected information immediately following. The reader can see at a glance what Bill Cory originally wrote and that he has updated the entry with information he feels to be more accurate. (Do it like this in HTML: The reader can see at a glance what <strike>Bill</strike> Cory originally wrote and that he has updated the entry with information he feels to be more accurate.)

This is very good advice. However, being the standards nazi that I am, I would change it slightly. The <strike> tag is now depreciated, in favour of the <del> tag. Also any text that is inserted after publishing should be marked with the <ins> tag. In almost all browsers, the del tag is defaulted to display as strike-through text, and the ins tag is displayed as underlined. eg. This is deleted text, This is inserted text.

However, using CSS you can display it in whatever way you like, eg. on this site I’ve got the tags set as follows: This is deleted text, This is inserted text, which is achieved with the following CSS code:

del {
color: #CDCDCD;
text-decoration: strike;
}

ins {
text-decoration: none;
background-color: #F5F5DC;
}

Also, it’s a good idea to use the datetime & title attributes for both of these tags. The datetime is a timestamp value of when the change happened, and the title gives a tooltip to tell the reader when the change happened. eg <del datetime="20041027 13:1:36" title="Deleted on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 13:01:36">This is deleted text</del>, which gives you this: This is deleted text (hover over that text to see the tooltip).

Now, this is not used a lot. And I’m as guilty as everyone else for not using these tags simply because it takes so long. Manually typing out

<del datetime="20041027 13:1:36" title="Deleted on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 13:01:36">This is deleted text</del><ins datetime="20041027 13:1:36" title="Inserted on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 13:01:36">This is inserted text</ins>

any time you want to change anything is simply impractical. Most of the software for posting to blogs don’t provide any automation for these tags, including the standard interface for Movable Type. As this is the blogging software I use, it’s for Movable Type that I’ve written up a modification to do this.

On the post entry/edit page there is a list of buttons for automating common HTML tags, Bold, italics, etc. . I’ve added two new ones, ins & del . Now, I’m sure you’ll all agree that they’re pretty bad graphics, but graphics isn’t my strong point (If you can do better, feel free to leave a comment!). Buy clicking on these buttons, it will automatically wrap the selected text in the appropriate tag, with the datetime & title values automatically generated.

This little piece of techno-magic is done by changing two files in movable type: mt.js & edit_entry.tmpl (MT 3.01).

Note: this is done for MT 3.01D, not the new fancy version with static and dynamic PHP publishing. I imagine it won’t work in that.This can also work for MT version 3.1, just use these files instead: mt.js & edit_entry.tmpl

You’ll need to drop the .txt (or .3_1.txt) off the end of the filename for this to work.

If you want to try this make a backup copy of the original two files first by renaming them with a .bak at the end of the file name. and note that this is offered completely without warranty or guarantee. If you do this & it screws up your blog, don’t come crying to me.

mt.js sits in your static folder, that is wherever you put the static files from the MT installation. If you’re not running MT in your cgi-bin then it’s probably in the MT folder, otherwise it’s wherever you moved those files to. The edit_entry.tmpl file is in the /tmpl/cms/ directory under the MT folder. All you need to do is replace the files you’ve got, with the ones i’ve got here. Also you’ll need the two images & and stick them in your <static>/images/ folder. If you can come up with better images, go for your life. If you want to leave a comment & share them with everyone that would be great too.

Anyway, that’s it. Here’s an image of what it should look like. After doing this (assuming it works) you’ll no longer have any excuse for not making explicit any changes you make on your website. So give it a shot, see how it goes & let me know!

For displaying the insert & delete tags on your site, have a look at Displaying document revisions, part 1 & part 2.