Should you refactor a blog post?

A few days ago, I took a blog post, https://nicheless.blog/post/a-busy-street, that I wrote here, and I posted it on my personal blog, https://johnjago.com/blog/busy-street/.

But there was a problem: I was disgusted with my own writing. I still believed in the message I was trying to convey, but the writing was awful. I was tempted to delete it from my personal blog.

When writing code, you can change the code without changing the external behavior. You might do this to make your code faster, for example. Or easier to understand.

Instead of deleting the blog post, I rewrote it. However, I think a better word for this is refactor. I refactored my blog post. I made it easier to understand without changing the message that it conveys.

On one hand, I feel like writing should be write-only. Not that you can't improve, but that you shouldn't delete the history of your improvement, which could be argued to be more valuable than the end result from a personal perspective. On the other hand, I feel like blog posts are a great thing to practice improving your writing on. It's almost like you get multiple practice runs with a single blog post. With that in mind, perhaps refactoring and ruthlessly removing hard-to-read versions of a blog post isn't so bad.

An early reader probably had a hard time reading it, but they got the message. Later readers simply have an easier time reading it.