Drafts Dates

When you post them, drafts show creation date rather than publish date when published, and you can only adapt it manually after posting.
At this point it is too late from them to be automatically cross-posted.
This is particularly painful, because drafted posts are by definition usually the highest quality and therefore most important to publicise.
Furthermore, the creation date is baked into the url, which is sometimes highly off-brand for timely posts you’ve prepared.
I suggested this to @manton around half-a-year ago, but I wanted to re-raise this here to find out if anyone else has this issue, or if there’s apps which solve.

A dirty workaround might be to copy the draft rather than publish, create a new post with the copied content, then delete the draft.

1 Like

Main annoyance is having to copy title & body separately, but I will adopt this in short-term.

I’ve now noticed that never-published drafts actually create a webpage E.g. https://wa.rner.me/2021/05/06/trump-as-halfbaked.html

Are you aware of this @manton? Is search engine indexing different on these pages?

If you simply hit Publish on a draft on Web

it seems the Cross-Posting does work.

It did on L. Warner (aka Cerulean) Writes (note the discrepancy between date in url and publish date)

Ack, that’s bad. Thanks for noticing. I’ll fix that today.

I’ve now fixed this internally and the change will roll out soon. To answer the other part of the question: these “still being published” pages are special and actually return a “404 not found” to search engines, so they will not be indexed.

Update: this change is now live.

1 Like

Thanks for clarifying they were not being broadcast.

While you’re on this topic you may want to implement a similar approach to Test Blogs as previously suggested: Deleting a test blog - #13 by warner

likewise this forum @manton (which I still believe should go one step further and be private for M.b community, or at least signup like Vito was)