D is for Draft

All blogging platforms allow you to start working on a blog post and save it for later as a “draft.” However, not all blog platforms are created equal. If you’re using Blogger, your drafts might be messing up your readers’ experience.

If you are saving draft versions of posts in Blogger, Blogger may be publishing those posts to your RSS feed. I have seen this on a number of blogs for probably over a year. The problem appears to be intermittent, so it might not have affected you yet.

Why is this a problem? Well, for one, if your post isn’t finished (and that’s clue #1 for me when I see this in my feed reader), your readers are going to be a little confused. It’s less than impressive, you know?

Secondly, regardless of whether the post is finished and polished, your readers might want to click through to comment—but when they do, they’re taken to a page that says the page doesn’t exist. Can’t tell you how many times that’s happened to me :-\ .

Finally, when you publish the post later, it may not show up in feed readers again.

There’s a possibility that this has something to do with another factor, such as scheduling posts to appear in the future.

I can’t find any documentation on this issue from Blogger, but I’ve seen this happen with half a dozen different Blogger blogs. However, if you’ve had this problem on your blog (off the top of my head, affected blogs I’ve seen include edittorrent, The Blood-Red Pencil and ali cross), I recommend pointing this out to Blogger Help.

Bottom line: if you have a time-sensitive post (or just want be absolutely sure your readers see your post when it’s ready, and only then), try using a test blog to draft, then cut and paste to your main blog.

What do you think? Have you ever seen this problem?