Blog Advice on Disappearing Posts After Editing

Welcome to Blog Advice for Occultists. Today's topic---Blog posts that disappear when you edit them.

One of the things I have noticed in the occult blogosphere is a distressing amount of ignorance among occult bloggers about the technology that they are using---aka blogs. Now, I will admit that I do not know everything that there is to know about blogging, but occasionally I can spot where other people are doing something wrong.

One of the things that I noticed is the number of posts that appear in the blogger feed and have disappeared ("post not found") by the time I go to read them. Some of these posts will reappear on their respective blogs weeks later.

Now, I realize that some of these posts have been removed because the blogger decided that what they said something that they did not want to say in the first place. Unfortunately, by hitting publish, the post has shown up in the feed...and worse, occasionally ends up being indexed by the search engines (I have read posts using the search engines cache that should have never been published).

Blog Advice for Occultists: Do not hit "publish post" if there is the slightest chance that you may not actually want people to read that post. Use "save now" instead.

(Note that I am writing from the perspective of a Blogger user; users of WordPress will have to adjust for that platform's buttons.)

Now some of these posts are actually meant to be read. So why do they disappear from the blog despite being published and seen in the feed. Simple, their creator noticed that they made some mistakes and went to correct the post in "edit posts." What went wrong? Odds are that the writer hit "save as draft" instead of "publish post" when they were done editing.

Drafts are not published and visible on the blog (though for some reason, the search engine spiders can occasionally get to them). They are removed from the blog; unfortunately as I mentioned eariler in this post, they are visible in the feed.

Blog Advice for Occultists: When done editing, hit publish, not "save as draft." And make sure that you are finished editing before you hit anything, saving as a draft removes the post from your blog; but leaves it in the news feed.

That concludes this edition of Blog Advice for Occultists. Remember to keep your pen sharp; you never know when you will have to stab an imp.