HACKER Q&A
📣 iio7

What do you think about deleting old irrelevant blog posts?


On personal blogs, what do you think about deleting old more or less irrelevant blog posts?


  👤 sircastor Accepted Answer ✓
Don’t do it. First, something somewhere points to it, and broken links on the web are a tragedy.

Second, irrelevant is highly variable. You may find the post doesn’t have a lot of value, but to others it might.

The only reason I can think to remove old material is if it’s the result of a legal obligation or a financial limitation, and in the case of the latter I’d still try to keep it up.


👤 MattGaiser
What makes them irrelevant? I have many times valued old Stack Overflow answers or out of date blog posts because I also needed to work with older tech.

👤 LinuxBender
If it is truly no longer relevant then no harm in zapping it. Consider replying with a Status: 410 Gone for search engines and give a friendly page saying "This page has been intentionally deprecated due to lack of relevance" or something along that line. You can create a webmaster account on google and have it crawl your site again to purge the 410 content from the index.

👤 h2odragon
Just because you once published something is not an implicit commitment to maintain it forever. So "yes its fine".

It's worth keeping your own archive just so you have a copy of your own work.


👤 ahmaman
I would delete posts only if they cause harm.

Irrelevant content is very subjective. You never know what somebody on the other end of the world find helpful.