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by ihatehandles 4332 days ago
How about this? I see a lot of breaking news websites (or blogs that post a story whose details they "update as details come in" have no way (ok, maybe I just haven't come across it) of retaining their readers - a way to subscribe to subsequent updates. So that means busy Bob will either completely forget to come back to the story letter or that he will search for the story again and go read on a competing publication.

So maybe a way for people to subscribe to these "developing stories"? An example implementation in WordPress would be that it adds next to the publish button a checkbox for indicating that this is a developing story. On the user end, all such posts show normally but with an email input and relevant messaging informing the user that the article will be updated as details come in and that they can be notified of them.

1 comments

I've noticed that Martin Fowler's '[bliki](http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/)' accomplishes this. He publishes a post in one or two paragraphs, and then updates them over the subsequent days. And in my RSS reader it shows up as a new post every time he makes an update, but points to the same page - albeit to a new section therein, so you can start reading from where you left off.
Yup, for RSS there are ways to implement this out of the box. I was thinking more about regular people who don't know or use RSS, people that publishers would like to retain over the course of reporting a developing story. How do you think this could be accomplished?