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Advanced Blogging Options
I’m not gonna teach you how to blog here. We’ve got a tutorial for how to post to your blog, and what you don’t know about the basics have been covered better elsewhere. What I’m gonna do here, though, is walk you through some of the tools we have here at Wicked Plum to help make your blogging easier.
“Advanced” is probably too strong a word for this stuff, honestly, and don’t let it scare you off — this is not only easy stuff, it’s really, really useful.
You’ve already had chapter and verse in how to post to your blog. And you know that once you’re done, you’ll use the ‘Publish’ button to send it off to be seen by the world.
But there’s a lot more in that ‘Publish’ box in the right sidebar.
The first tool you’ll find there is ‘Save Draft’. Use this when you’re ready to shut down your computer for the night, when it’s time to switch to another project for a while, or every five minutes while you’re writing. You’re familiar with the adage ‘Save early, save often’, I hope? Yeah. Do that.
The second is ‘Preview’. You want to see what your post will look like once it’s all grown up, right? This does that. Just click ‘Preview’…
…and it’ll open another tab that’ll contain a preview of your magnum opus.
Click it again once you’ve made changes, and it’ll show you what you’ve done.
Say your shop has a couple of different partners, and you want your partner to look over a blog post before you post it. Or you think you’re done writing it, but just want to look over it in a day or two to make sure. You can change the ‘Status’ to ‘Pending Review’ to signify this. (This doesn’t actually make any substantive change in the status of the post itself, but it’s useful for separating draft posts from posts that are almost ready to be posted.)
You can also make posts private — visible only to you — or make them password protected, so only certain people can see them. Or you can make a post ‘sticky’, so that it will always appear at the top of your blog (more about these here).
And here’s the best part — post scheduling. It took me years to figure this out and boy, has it made my life easier. Write an entire week’s worth of posts (or a month’s worth, if you’re ambitious) and schedule em out. Then wander off and goof around for a while, because Wicked Plum will make them go for you. It’s all under ‘Publish’.
Not sure what you’ve got scheduled to post when? Click on ‘Blog’ and ‘Manage’…
…and it’ll display each post, complete with when it’s scheduled to go.
All done scheduling and private-ing and draft-ing? You’ll notice that ‘Publish’ changes depending on what you’ve done — it might become ‘Schedule’ or ‘Update’. But it’ll all do the same thing — save your post and make it ready to go.
