WordPress beats TypePad (again): Post or Page Revisions

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WordPress beats TypePad (again): Post or Page Revisions

August 2, 2008 Jan Leave a comment Go to comments

Useful or Not?

I’m still trying to think of why this is useful, but it most certainly is a function that WordPress has and TypePad has not: Post revisions. WordPress keeps track of all your post revisions, from start until now, so in essence, you have full overview of how you have edited and saved your post over its lifetime. You can see your revision by going down all the way to the bottom of your screen when you are editing a post. You can also compare revisions and even restore and go back to older revisions of your post. Well, this IS useful.

Extending Undo A Little to Undo Everything

One thing is to have the Undo button, but sometimes you edit or delete something and then hit Save. In that case the Undo button is of absolutely no use, because it it is reset to zero, so to speak. Now you can go to post revisions and either restore or copy and paste back the deleted paragraph. What post revisions does not do is keep a backup of deleted posts. Deleted is deleted. You cannot bring it back, or can you?

Using Google’s cache to bring back deleted posts

Usually you can bring back deleted published posts by doing a Google Site Search. Mind you, this only works for published posts. It also depends on whether Google has already indexed and cached your post. In Google, type

site:tpvswp.wordpress.com (Replace my “tpvswp” with the name of your blog)

Google Site Search

That brings all pages that Google has on record for my site. You can narrow down your search:

site:tpvswp.wordpress.com/2008/06/

Google Site Search by date

That brings up all posts for June 2008. You can even be post specific:

site:tpvswp.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/wordpress-versus-typepad-sticky-posts/

Google Post Search

Which brings up a post from yesterday. Now click the “cached” link under the post. That brings up the post.

A cached post on Google

Nothing is ever lost.

Your deleted post or page is forever on the Internet

Now, this method really depends on whether Google has already cached your post or not, so this is not a foolproof method. It also goes to show that whatever you post to the internet, it will stay there forever, whether you want it or not. Eventually, Google may drop it, maybe. However, using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you should be able to clear Google’s index of your unwanted post. I will cover the Webmaster tools in a later post.