Kev Quirk recently wrote about removing content from public blogs:
Generally speaking, I don't delete content from this site. Having said that, if I posted something that I later feel is particularly egregious, I think I probably would. I personally don't think that a website should be a permanent record - how can it be? Nothing last forever.
This got me thinking about what to do with some of my older articles. I believe that URLs should be stable. The internet is a large place, there’s no way to know who might be linking to any of my webpages. Removing a page may also break other websites: someone may have written about it. Deleting the page would remove the context of their reference.
However, I’ve been working on this website in some form or another since 2007. Technical articles tend to get outdated, and people change their minds about things they’ve written. Some of the articles on this website no longer reflect what I stand for.
Articles older than two years already include a banner noting their age, but that’s not always enough. Nowadays, people often form an opinion based on the title alone — especially on social media. It’s unlikely they’d notice a note about how old the article is.
So I decided to hide certain articles. Hidden articles are no longer linked on my website and don't appear in RSS feeds. You can’t find them by clicking around. But if you already have the link, the content is still accessible. Because, as they say, cool URIs don't change.