Feb 17, 2008


I don`t know if there was a line in the Blogger in Draft team 2008 resolutions that said they needed to release features in february that should have been in the latest Blogger Version Launch (v3.0). that is what one could think just from judging the last two Blogger Draft Features.

The latest is one that made more than one to leave Blogger in 2007:
Scheduled Posting.

Because Scheduled Posting importance increased a lot in 2007 as Blogging was getting more serious and more previous Old Media personalities drifted into Blogging. the reason is because while one of the principles of common blogging is inmediacy, another in Pro Blogging is "Journalistic Quality" (yeah, i know most don`t stand up to that). so there are Articles you just cannot write in one go, or that you just can`t post on the go and in the latest case, there are sometimes you are under embargo and cannot post something until the date of if passes (yeah, some bloggers don`t respect that either) and those are pretty much the biggest reasons why you would need scheduled posting.

But in average blogging terms, there is also another to have in count: Blog Flow.

Blog Flow is the periodicity you set yourself to Blog and that to some it is the easiest way to mantain a Blog.

So if you are used to post once a day from monday to friday, but sometimes you write two posts, you can easily schedule the latter post to cover for one of the days you are used to post.

Same goes for those that follow a theme and whose entries are long when they go on vacations, they can then easily leave the Blog Flow in automatic while they are gone if they don`t want to interrupt it.

Having said all that you can understand how strange and incredible it results that Blogger just now is testing that feature to add it to Blogger when some had it two years ago!.



The Blogger in Draft blog does detail how easy to use Scheduled posting is:

"Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.Your scheduled posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published."


Now,what happens to those who use Post into the Future as a way to have welcome post or adding a Widget or Element into blog?. that is resolved in the Additional notes:

    "We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top"

    "As with published posts, the post editor does not autosave scheduled posts if you go back and edit them. You wouldn’t want the post to publish while you’re in the middle of editing it! You can save the scheduled post as a draft to remove the scheduling and this will turn autosave back on"

    "In some testing we’ve found that schedule posting is not working for some FTP blogs. If you run across this, please let us know in the comments so we can try to track it down" <--- (in other words? it has lots of bugs, so avoid using it now if you are a FTP Blogger user)


I understand that this is a Draft Blogger feature because it needs to be tested to ensure it works right for when it is deployed for everyone. but given you need to use the Draft Blogger Dashboard to use it, it is one of those Draft Blogger features that really needs to be put in the Fast Track for the regular Blogger.

Simple because the users that are going to use this feature the most usally don`t use just Blogger (one platform) so they use Blogging Editors like Windows Live Writer, Scribefire, Flock, Ecto or they also use their Phones to post.

via Blogger in Draft



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you test out my 'Keep date/time' userscript with this and see if it breaks? I don't want to go through Blogger draft just to check this one thing if it's not broken :P

Avatar X said...

Ok, i will check and let you know.

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