But when I do…nevermind. Since day one, Prince Street has usually been written “in one take”.
Typically edits on posts after they have been [posted/“gone live”/Sent] are typically to fix, as we would say at work as a diplomatic way of saying “nothing to see here”: miner grammatical errors.
Because sometimes people like posts or comment on them and I don’t want to threaten their trust. As if, once you Like or Comment on something that sets that post as forever unchangeable after the fact. It would feel awful to have added that fingerprint to something that then turned into something you would never have liked if you had known someday it would become something you couldn’t ever look at, like, or even acknowledge.
I promise you: I would not do that.
But
But, sometimes I do change posts and here’s a note acknowledging how that works and framing my promise to anyone reading anything on this blog.
I love this thing called Prince Street.
I take the thought of changing a post seriously. Even more if I am considering an edit after someone has already commented on it.
What I have done is add and only if it builds on what was already written. It will never change the tone or values of the post.
A great example that comes to mind was my add-Venture-ing post. It was so exciting seeing VIA’s new train sets and I never expected to see them or then see so many so I kept adding to that post. If you saw that post in its initial form and today you will see it has changed but is just more of the same.
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about an issue I had when working on the latest shed model I had made. This blog is at journal and I wanted to talk about an issue I was having with the model specifically. As I moved from problem toward solution I could feel changes that reached beyond the cardboard walls of the model to the soul in me. I was getting better and growing better. I kept adding to the post. Changes materialized under headers to distinguish new content from existing but the story remained one of resolution and I think this was the best way to tell that story in a way that considered readability overall.
Here’s a very recent example. Changes here came in these ways:
- I added a drawing;
- I reframed a paragraph because I wanted to practice the design of prose that is also the post’s opening paragraph since that mattered as much as practice as prologue; and
- I wanted to say more about an emotional time of growth I am living in professionally right now and the words aren’t covering the wounds.
you/we matter
Particularly with mon•day•ne I felt the apology was responsible. Words are like any creative medium and sometimes they cover like Testor’s ‘Battle Grey’ and sometimes like a dried out yellow highlighter. We reach for the right ones but as the tools and fuels of communication when read/write is all we have when what we need is the embrace of you-I I can’t see not trying harder.
And sometimes I think it would be annoying to keep getting emails from this blog because I thought a little more about something we already talked about.
So a balance.
I will never change the tone of something here. Words added to past posts are only invited guests to a roaring good party already in progress.
Thnaks Thanks
The love I had for you is the love I have for you.
Categories: blog maintenance
Prince Street 
An interesting situation for a blogger, Chris.
I applaud your sense of accountability to your loyal readers. I aspire to it, but am perhaps a little more loosey-goosey, for a reason. Some Trackside Treasure posts are living posts that change over time as I track VIArious ongoing situations: buffer cars, Venture implementation and others. However, when I re-do and add to an existing post substantially, I’ve started republishing an augmented post as an ‘Enhanced Post’ to indicate the updating. The original post is allowed to live in cyberspace in its original form, sometimes linked-to, months or years back in time.
Your reference to Testor’s Flat Battle Grey cast my mind back to a small box of Testor’s paints, a Gerber’s baby food jar of dirty grey turpentine in a Lysol lid, and me, a kid in our living room painting models. Flat OD Green, Flat Military Brown, Flat Army Olive and all the others in the glass menagerie were another set of childhood friends for me. That unsatisfying thinness of the paint when first opened, the later gelling and opaqueness after being exposed to the air and how well they covered.
Thanks goodness blogs – and bloggers – are living things!
Eric
Eric. I really appreciate such compassionate counsel. It helps to have this as a conversation even if across the internet. I felt I was struggling with how to address the subject of how to edit blogs. Considering the age of Prince Street and Trackside Treasure respectively it’s something we’ve perhaps both thought about and may continue to.
Thank you for the reminder of how you update previous posts. I like how you do that. It makes sense and builds on the existing record in a way that would be less relatable if I was reading across linked posts.
That we build these blogs in an accessible domain invites us to consider the space they share with people who use them. I worried about someone doubting the integrity of my work by discovering the sense of it changing so started thinking about my “rules” for what could be folded into existing writing and where that threshold should be to help me see what should really be a new article.
Thank you. I so appreciate your thoughts on this one.
Chris
And I adore the nostalgia trip into Testors. I swear I could hear those little bottles and even smell them; even the various techniques of freeing a lid I had ‘glued’ in place with paint on jar threads.
Was it everyone? I too used a former glass babyfood jar for my brush cleaner. I never thought about compatibility of solvent to paint so this jar was a cocktail of whatever I was decanting from the parental workshop.
None of those paint labels ever made sense. They were all “army” colours. Including OD (which was always “odd” green to me). That “maybe you have a good allergy” flag military brown was not an appealing looking colour but it was also my go to for painting rails. It might even be one of the few paints I wish I could still get. (For trivia: the other one is Floquil Roof Brown; for the same use of painting rails)
I’m really enjoying this nostalgia too. Thank you.
Chris
Also in the paint tray in their tiny tin cans were Humbrol. Almost always also with military palette plans. Duck Egg Blue? Ideal for WW2 airplane undersides, but was there a railway application? It was much later that I got occasional bottles of Tamiya, and yes, two or three Floquil bottles like Tuscan and boxcar red.
I should add that the Testors paint bottles I started out with were potted prior to Canadian postal codes and safety warnings that appeared on newer bottles. Were they even bilingually-labelled? Paint-être oui!
Someone doubting the integrity of your work should give his or her head a shake like a bottle of Testors (though I usually used a paintbrush end or a discarded piece of sprue to mix). But it’s best to have a procedure in place in case they do, rather than scrambling to publish retractions, corrections, redirections or other retrowordsmithing.
Digression: There’s a word..SPRUE! And I respect the work of Ben Agiter, whoever he is , who puts his name on bottles of salad dressing! Let’s mix things up!
When Facebook still valued my participation, I would sometimes delete a post that I had published even if it had a like or comment or two, before revising and republishing it. Maybe there were FB friends scratching their heads and saying, “Huh, where’d that post go?” We can be grateful that blogging platforms, and the work we put into them and onto them, makes our posts malleable but enduringly manufactured.
Good talk, Chris!
Eric
I am really enjoying this exchange. Very relaxing on a day of bottle in-tin-we work stress it’s nice to unwind with some paint nostalgia.
I feel like Testors bottles had different generations of how the lids were printed. Was it different Testors logos?
I definitely recall the iterations of labels. (You mentioned the history of Testors bottles and I recall ones that were certainly pre-everything. I think they were barely labelled for colour and brand.)
Humbrol! Still a favourite. I still love those cute little miniature paint tins. And they still feel like some of the most vibrant and saturated colours I could get. The series I recall had a colour set for not just railways but I had a Humbrol tin of “CN Yellow” that was perfect.
Are we allowed favourite colours? Ones were “straight from the bottle” they were favourites. In addition to the Testors colours mentioned earlier I would add these Humbrol tins that modelling never felt the same after: Cement, Track Colour, and Leather.
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No one questioned the post post edits but I was part way through an edit to a post when I brought the question to myself.
Part of me liked that there would be these little rewards embedded in past posts. This current culture of devouring media has us in a strange culture of constant motion lacking any kind of returning to comfortable known content. I still have a couple of issues of 1970’s era Model Railroader magazines I love to reread. Equally, I have favourite posts from your blog that I like to reread.
Part of me just wanted to acknowledge that I will revisit old posts and to consider my self-imposed guides.
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I love a conversation like this one. Thank you.
Thank you for this. I am grateful for it.
Chris