I’ve been using nttp//rss lately, and I’ve uncovered a nice little feature. (Oh that word ‘feature’ is always trouble, as it’s sometimes interchangeable with the word ‘bug’ depending on your perspective.)
See, nntp//rss stores each item in an RSS feed as an item that you can read in your newsreader. Well, I noticed that occasionally you’d see double, meaning an item would appear twice – or so it seems. Reading the title of two items would make you think they were the same, but reading the contents would make you realize that you were getting the original post, and a version that was later edited.
Many of us edit posts for various reasons, such as fixing mispellings, adding a note via <ins> or getting rid of something via <del> perhaps, but there are some people out there who write something, sometimes without thinking first, or sometimes just plain stupid. Well, now we can easily do a diff between posts, and see how people alter what they wrote, perhaps changing the entire tone in the process. Is there anything wrong with changing something you wrote to say something quite different? I’ll let you decide that.