Earlier today I put up a post about Evan Williams telling Sarah Lacy to "fuck off." I've gone in and changed that post a bunch of times after I originally hit "publish." I changed the headline. I changed the first paragraph. I struck out a few lines, and added some others. I took out some stuff that didn't read well, or was detracting from the post. I added a video of Jim Croce singing "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" at the bottom. And so on.

Apparently this process of editing a blog post irks some people. How can you change a post after you've published it? There is, I'm told, some kind of sacred rule of blogging that says you can't ever change a word in a post once it has been published.

Here's the thing. This is how I work as a blogger. It's not how you work when you write for print, obviously. But to me part of the pleasure of blogging is that you can go back in and fix things and add things and keep working on something.

It's how I've always worked when I wrote a blog. It's how I worked when I did Fake Steve, and when I wrote my own blog. It's an iterative process, and for me the process doesn't necessarily end once I've hit "publish." I go back and look at things. I see lines that don't work, and I cut them out. I think of something I like, and put it in. I edit. I polish. I rewrite headlines. I fix and improve, or try to, anyway.

I don't always work this way. Sometimes, I just hit publish and move on. But other times I'm not happy with the original post and so I go work on it some more.

It has never occurred to me that anyone would even care about this. Apparently some people do. So if you are going to read this blog, consider this a disclaimer. And take this advice: