Thursday, June 07, 2007

Blogger Draft Posts

Looking at the full list of posts on FBS this morning, I see a significant number of repeated drafts prior to final posts by several contributors. Although these drafts don't show to external readers, they will cause Sam an administrative problem if they are allowed to build up like this.

As far as I can see the problem originates from a change made recently by Blogger and does not affect users on other hosts. In response to complaints from users who neglected to save their own work and subsequently lost it, the change means that Blogger now auto-saves draft text as you type it. Unfortunately, certain changes (and I'm not sure exactly which) result in the system creating multiple drafts. I generated one from this post by delaying before writing a post header.

It would be a good idea if everyone on Blogger checks their recent posts and deletes unwanted drafts. Otherwise Sam will be drowned with admin work. I'll leave mine on display for a few days to illustrate the problem.

This Post was written by Trig from Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef.

7 comments:

Kristin said...

umm,
blogger has also been 'eating' my drafts. the draft looks good - i publish it - only to have whole sentences (or half a paragraph!) just gone!
so maybe that's been happening to others? it meant i had to re-publish the same post about 3 times, before it all went across.

Edward said...

I have noticed similar problems too, with my own blog.

I think the solution is to place a title for the post, very early on, rather than at the end.

I have found by doing this, there seems to be only the one post that is saved as a draft.

Kalyn Denny said...

Having lost enormous posts, I'm a fan of the new "auto-save" feature. I haven't had any problems, but maybe that's because I always put the title first?

Nice of you to alert people to this problem. I'm guessing a lot of them don't know they have draft posts in there.

Sam said...

Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem, Trig. I am wondering if there really is any harm in them lying around? I don't really have the time to pay attention to other peoples' unpublished drafts and they will slip of the page eventually, so unless there is some issue I am unaware of that is caused by them, I am not going to be doing anything with them.

Sam said...

Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem, Trig. I am wondering if there really is any harm in them lying around? I don't really have the time to pay attention to other peoples' unpublished drafts and they will slip of the page eventually, so unless there is some issue I am unaware of that is caused by them, I am not going to be doing anything with them.

FJKramer said...

The only harm (if that's what you could call it) if they don't bother Sam is that Blogger only displays some 300 posts and the drafts would probably eat into that number

Trig said...

They do make a mess when you are looking at the list of posts as a contributor, rather than as an outside reader of the blog. As the only people who can remove them are the blog owner and the contributors, it's not hard to work out who should do the cleaning up. I'll remove my draft next week.