Heya.
Your current approach to status linode.com is to make a post with an announcement, then repeatedly edit it with updates (and final completion message).

Problem with that is that an edited post doesn't have its ID (or timestamp or something - honestly, I never looked under the hood of RSS) changed, and because of that, RSS readers don't download the updates to edited posts - they display the initial message, or whatever the edits were at the moment the RSS reader "saw it for the first time".

So when I see a post that is relevant to me on RSS, I need to open it in browser, and remember to refresh every couple of minutes looking for updates.

If there is a good workaround available already - could you please share it here for people like me who aren't aware of it?

Regards,
-- .

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

Looks like the Atom feed is already using published and updated elements to reflect modifications:

    <entry>
        <title>RESOLVED - Tokyo Connectivity Issues</title>
        <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://status.linode.com/2012/05/tokyo-connectivity-issues.html" />
        <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="http://status.linode.com/2012/05/tokyo-connectivity-issues.html" thr:count="0" />
        <id>tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0128765932c2970c01676610937c970b</id>
        <published>2012-05-03T08:22:47-04:00</published>
        <updated>2012-05-03T09:40:32-04:00</updated>
        <summary>9:40am (EDT): The connectivity issue with our upstream provider has been resolved. 8:20am (EDT): We are aware of an issue affecting connectivity for Linodes in the Tokyo datacenter. We are investigating and will post an update with more information shortly. There is no reason to issue reboot jobs at this time.</summary>
...

The RSS2 feed only has pubDate which doesn't appear to change once an article is modified.

Not sure which feed readers are capable of noticing when the updated value has changed - I don't really use them.

Well, mine apparently doesn't, as I'm using the Atom feed. Thanks for the hint, anyway.

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

One of us could produce a proxy feed that takes the Linode RSS and passes it through unmodified except to add a new node whenever there's an update, instead of updating the existing node.

On the slight chance you were serious... that's quite an overkill solution, and doesn't sound quite worth the effort.
Thanks, tho.

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.