Cleaning Cached Blog Entries in Google Reader - Or: How to Remove Unwanted Posts from Google Reader

While I was working on my next article using Windows Live Writer, I've hit the "publish" button too soon and ended up with a published draft in my blog. I just went and re-drafted the entry, thinking everything was going to be fine. Unfortunately, I did not realize that Google Reader automatically caches everything it finds, and do not delete entries even if them have been deleted from their original blog.

After some researching, I've found out that if I published a new post with the same GUID as the unwanted entry, it would be automatically updated in Reader. So here are the steps to remove an unwanted blog post from Google Reader:

Removing an unwanted blog post from Google Reader

Step 1: Consulting Reader's cache

Type the following address in your address bar, substituting yourblogname by your actual blog name:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?r=n&n=100

Go to the page, then right click its content and select "View page source" or equivalent.

Step 2: Find the offending post

Find the string "blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/" and notice the two numbers that come after it:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8842221210811726528-2876694319097447217?l=yourblog.blogspot.com

Those are your blog ID and post ID, respectively.

Step 3: Resurrection!

Copy and paste these two numbers in the placeholders of the following URL:

http://draft.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=yourblogid&postID=yourpostid

Finally, open this URL and watch your once deleted (?) blog post be resurrected from the dead. Update it or just leave it blank, set the post date to the future and publish it again. Voilà!

 

Update: Unfortunately, the original post title will remain as the URL for the entry. As you can see, this was going to be a post about Partial Least Squares Analysis. However, I'll leave it as is to prove this procedure really works. Cheers!

Update 2: I made a simple application to browse and edit deleted blogger posts that have been cached by Google Reader. The program, together with the C# source code can be found here. The program uses the Google Reader API developed by Matt Berseth.