Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for Feburary 29th

We pushed out a few bug fixes to the latest Blogger in draft features last night:

• Renaming of feeds in the Blog List now works
• Correct cache invalidation so that changes to Blog List subscriptions will now be reflected immediately
• Scheduled posts now have correct permalinks

Enjoy!

Update, 3/4: Unfortunately the permalink problem for scheduled posts is not solved.

Update, 3/6: The permalink problem has been fixed.

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New feature: Scheduled Posts

We’ve often heard that sometimes you’d like to write a post now and have it automatically published at some time in the future. We listened, and are pleased to say that this feature is ready for you to try out on Blogger in draft.

Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

Your scheduled posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published.

Remember: Like all features described on this blog, Scheduled Posts only work when you’ve logged in to http://draft.blogger.com/.

Leave your feedback in the comments!

Additional Notes:

• We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top.
  
• As with published posts, the post editor does not autosave scheduled posts if you go back and edit them. You wouldn’t want the post to publish while you’re in the middle of editing it! You can save the scheduled post as a draft to remove the scheduling and this will turn autosave back on.
  
• In some testing we’ve found that schedule posting is not working for some FTP blogs. If you run across this, please let us know in the comments so we can try to track it down.
  

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New Feature: Blog List

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. Our latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but we’ve mixed it in with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

Please try this out! Add a Blog List (Or two! Or more!) to your blog and let us know what you think in the comments. We value your feedback, and will try to incorporate as much as we can before the Blog List goes big-time on www.blogger.com.

Remember: Like all features mentioned on this blog, you must log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ to add a Blog List.

Additional Notes

• The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.
• The icon next to a feed is taken from the favicon.ico file in the blog’s home directory. We currently do not support the “shortcut icon” link tag.
• Adding and removing blogs may not invalidate our cached version of your blog. If you’re having trouble seeing your changes, republish a post or make a small settings change to your blog. Update, 2/29: This has been fixed.
  
• Some blogs don’t link to their Atom and RSS feeds in a way that we can detect. In these cases, add the feed URL to the Blog List for best results.
  
• Only the blog admin who added the Blog List may edit and configure it. Why is that? You’ll find out later...

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