Duplicate Post? Be Careful!

I'll bet we've all made duplicate posts, from time to time.

I, personally, am in the habit of hitting the Back button, when presented with"Your blog published successfully.", whenever I look at what I just posted, and realise that I should have said that just a wee bit differently. Do that immediately after publishing a new post, and you'll end up with a duplicate.

Or maybe you hit "Publish Post" twice, maybe while Blogger is sluggish (as if that never happens).

Or maybe you lack imagination, and you reused the title. Maybe you wrote "Something Or Other" some time ago, and now you feel the need to write a second post in that series.

Either way, you now have two posts with the same title, and with similar URLs. If your blog is http://myblog.blogspot.com, and you just posted "Something Or Other", you probably have 2 posts now:

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other.html

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-some-other-nonsense.html

where "some-other-nonsense" got added into the URL, to allow you to have two posts titled "Something Or Other".

If you now delete one post, and you don't watch what you're doing, you'll end up with "Something Or Other" having a URL

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-some-other-nonsense.html

If you delete that post, and publish "Something Or Other" yet a third time, you'll end up with

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-and-yet-more-nonsense.html

.

When you see that you have duplicate posts, go to the Edit Posts menu. When you see two posts with the same title, find the column with the "Delete" links. Immediately left of "Delete", you'll see "View". Before you "Delete" any post, put the mouse over "View", and see what URL is associated with that post. Only select "Delete" for

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-some-other-nonsense.html

and maybe

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-some-other-nonsense-and-yet-more-nonsense.html

Be careful - make sure that you do not "Delete"

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other.html

And having deleted the duplicate (which is the only way to get rid of posts with unwanted file names), and if you truly need to reuse the title of a previous post, rewrite the new edition of "Something Or Other" - but with a unique title. Call it "Something Or Other #2" or "Something Or Other Updated".

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
something-or-other-2.html

is a far better file name to work with.

Remember naming conventions, too. Words like "A" and "The" are not significant, and get dropped from the post file name. If you had one post with a title "Here's A Problem", and second "Here's The Problem", guess what the second file name will be?

http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/
heres-problem-some-other-nonsense.html

Always name your posts with care, and start them out with unique phrases.