Sunday, February 17, 2008

Updated: The one feature I've always wanted

Blogger is now testing the ability to do scheduled posts.

It's extremely simple to do: Just go to the Blogger in Draft dashboard (their area for testing new features), write your post like you normally would, and set the time for the post to the time you want it to publish.

Then you just hit publish and it will automatically put up the post at the time you specify.

Since it's still in draft, you can't just set the time forward in Windows Live Writer and have it work, but I found a workaround that gets the job done:

  1. Write your post in Live Writer as you normally would.
  2. Use the area to the right of the labels list on the bottom of the window to set your desired publish date and time.
  3. Save the post as a draft to Blogger when you're done with it. To do that, click on the arrow next to "Save Draft" and select "Post Draft to Weblog." You'll get an "Are you sure?" message because the time that's set is in the future and Blogger does not support future publishing. Click "Yes".
  4. Go to the Blogger in Draft dashboard. Click on the link to manage posts in the desired blog.
  5. You'll see the post listed as a draft. Click on edit nest to the post.
  6. Click on "Publish post".
  7. Now your post will magically appear at the time you set.

This is a feature I can see myself using a lot since I have a tendency to sit down and spit a few posts out at once. This post was set to publish later and I've currently got one scheduled to publish in a few hours and one tomorrow morning.

Uodate:

There's a bug with scheduled posting that's not automatically generating permalink links. The suggested workaround from Blogger:

To view the full URL, go back to the Manage/Edit Post view. Select "view" on the newly published view. The full URL will display on the scheduled and published post.

The good news is you only have to do it for one scheduled post and they all will generate the links.

4 comments:

K T Cat said...

I'm going to try this right now!

K T Cat said...

Groovy. This will make a big difference to me since I write in the morning, but would like fresh posts to show up throughout the day. I'll link to this post as well.

Dean said...

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to give it a shot.

Anonymous said...

Makes me wish I were back on Blogger.

Their software has come a LONG way since I used to use the phrase "permalinks are Blogspotted" and everyone knew what I meant.