posting corrections to news items

[james438]

I can't think how to best title this question in a few words.

On my website I have a news page where I like to post news on a few issues that I like to keep up on. As I go through the news archives on my page I can see that my reporting on certain stories has improved. When I go back in the archives even further I can see errors here and there, grammar or factual, and I correct them. I also try to add reference links to those older articles to make them more useful. Some end up getting updated and refined many many times.

I post the date it was written at the top and the date last updated at the bottom of the news item. If I were to add another part to the page displaying the news item that posts at the bottom of the page in a list or comment format what was changed when what would be the best way to go about it? For example, I could list the changes at the bottom in a smaller font, I could add a link to go to another page that lists all of the changes, I could use a collapsible div.

As an example here is one of my news items.

Just curious what ideas on this layout project people might have.

[djr33]

Why not just update the text and make a note of the last update? If you want you could show the older version in case someone would refer to it. But basing this on a forum model, there's no problem just changing the text.

[james438]

That is an option too. That is what I currently do actually. It might be a good idea then to leave things as they are. Adding notation of exactly what has changed when I make corrections to a news post might not add to the quality of the page in this case.

[djr33]

If what you're interested in is letting the visitors track changes, then one option is to track text differences by comparing an earlier version to the current version.

I use this:
http://pear.php.net/package/Text_Diff/redirected
It works well and it's fast.

It's annoying to install and I recommend setting up your own function (eg, gettextdiff($a,$b)) since the defaults are a little hard to work with.

Basically it gives you <ins> and <del> tags that you can style using CSS as you'd like. I use colors and strikethrough/underline.