No matter how I edit and agonize before hitting the Post button, I always go back and edit some more (it's happening right now with this post). Sometimes I indicate that I've updated the post, but sometimes I'll throw in whole paragraphs without so much as a kiss my foot.
I do eventually decide to live with what I've got. I see old posts all the time that I'd love to rewrite, but I leave them alone.
I wonder if there is or should be a WordPress plug-in that allows readers to see old versions of a post.
Your post immediately reminded me of a post by Mark Pilgrim in 2003, which was sort of an answer to Dave Winer, about the ethics of editing old weblog posts:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/07/18/dive_into_accountability
Ironically it looks like passing of time means you can't actually see a diff of the post (or if you can, I don't know where the link is).
Anyway, I'm fairly sure WordPress does store multiple revisions of posts, such as when you are editing one that is already published and the auto-save is triggered. But maybe that is cleared on publish.
Hi Ben,
I've seen multiple revisions of a post listed in WordPress's edit page, but it looks like they are indeed cleared at some point.
I wonder if anybody's tried patching WordPress to push every change to, say, a git repository whenever it is saved. This wouldn't provide ironclad accountability, since as pointed out in the DiveIntoMark discussion you still have to trust the blogger to really save everything. But it might be interesting to readers. As a blogger I would find it interesting to look back at how I modified a post.