December 21, 2007
Be careful and don’t post your draft… unless you mean to!
Filed under miscellaneous
I’ve just been using Google Reader for several weeks now and have already seen some instances where people have inadvertently posted a draft and then retracted it when they realized it. The first one I saw was one on Opal Tribble’s Vegan Momma and I think that another was on Dan Rinnert’s DCR Blogs. I don’t remember what either of the posts was about and the only reason that I knew something had happened was that I had clicked on the title to go to the blog and landed on an error message. Opal has an error message that says: “Easy, tiger. This is a 404 page. You are totally in the wrong place. Do not pass GO; do not collect $200.” Dan’s just says “Error 404 - Not Found.”
The third one I saw because the blogger blogged about it. Thomas Willingham, a technical writer at Microsoft, was working on Becoming a Technical Writer when he hit publish instead of one of the drop down menus. He wrote about the error in Feed Subscribers - Welcome to My Process, an interesting short post.
I’ve posted several times before I was ready to. Generally the post is essentially done, but I’ve not proofed it for errors or not identified the tags or some other relatively simple thing. I try very hard to not hit the publish button until I’m absolutely ready.
One way to limit publishing before a post is complete would be to always write the draft using a word processing program and then copy and paste the material into WordPress. However, for me that adds a level of complexity that I don’t need with more potential for making mistakes.
Comments on "Be careful and don’t post your draft… unless you mean to!" »
Thomas @ 12:51 pm
I typically use Windows Live Writer to write my posts, and this is really the first time I have encountered this issue. It was more user error than anything else.
It was late and I had a long day. I was in the process of cleaning up and formatting the post when I hit Publish, instead of the formatting drop-down list.
Apparently the feed reader was in overdrive because it was immediately posted to the feed. Well I just figured the nature of the beast is transparency so I would blog about what happened.
JoLynn Braley @ 12:55 pm
Hi Mike,
I know what you mean and I’ve learned that as far as Technorati tags go, if you don’t have those in your post before you publish it, you only have a couple of seconds to edit them and you’re lucky if it do get picked up!
I’ve pretty much gotten a routine down so that this doesn’t happen anymore but I used to forget those tags sometimes when I first started blogging. Here’s to perfect posting in 2008! (LOL)
dcr @ 2:50 pm
I think I remember the one you are referring to. I think it was one where I was having trouble uploading an animated GIF through WordPress. I had to upload a substitute graphic, publish, check the URL, and then replace that manually with the actual graphic.
There was another time where something was published before I wanted because of a discrepancy between my time and the server’s time.
Mike Goad @ 3:05 pm
Thomas - It’s a great “instant topic” which I had a little experience with myself - which made it a natural for a short post for today.
JoLynn - and 2009, 2010, and forever!
Mike Goad @ 3:50 pm
Dan, I was running into a similar problem when I was trying to publish to my blog from flickr. When I published from there, the results were not what I wanted the end product to be, so I would edit the post and save it as a draft, then edit it to look like what I wanted. I’ve since figured a different way to do what I wanted.
teeni @ 8:13 pm
Hi Mike - there’s something for you at my site when you get a chance.
http://vtroom.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/im-a-colorful-friend/
Opal Tribble/Vegan Momma @ 9:10 pm
As with Thomas it is a “user error” on my part.
All my writings are created in Scrivener. Occasionally I pull them when I want to add or take from a post. 