Let’s say I want a blog that is a subset of another blog. This is useful for things like: sharing to a specific audience without sharing the full blog, hosting on a specialized domain, etc.
Is there a way to do this such that when I find something I need to edit in a post, it automatically edits in both? As in, one is the “source” for that content and the other picks up the changes, not just new posts?
I think if you add the sub-blog’s RSS as a source to the larger blog on Micro.blog that would work. I don’t know for sure that changes in the RSS feed are picked up and edited versus new RSS posts just saving into the umbrella blogs.
I’m not sure there’s a big advantage here (other than URL I guess?) over categories, each of which have a category-specific RSS feed and page, if you think someone may only be interested in a subset of your content.
The rss capturing changes would be the big question.
A concrete example of why this is useful is sharing “professional” posts without the rest of your blog.
When feeds are set to import into another blog, edits are not currently supported. That is something we could add, but you still might run into problems because it’s only going to work as long as the active posts are in the RSS feed, since the feeds are usually limited to 30 or so recent posts.
However, that might not be a big deal in practice unless you are editing posts a lot. You would just need to make edits in both blogs. New posts could be made in one place and would go to both blogs automatically.
I think it would be rare (and worth the effort) to edit posts that are farther back than 30 or so.
What defines that number?
Most RSS feeds don’t want to contain the whole history of a webpage in a single huge XML file and are often not paginated. As a result, most software that make feeds don’t list an unlimited number of items. By convention, 30 and 100 are very common item limits.
Also, to support updating, your blog can’t replace the unique identifier for an entry when it’s modified (which some bad software does do).