Publish New Posts Sooner, And Edit After You Publish, To Avoid AutoSave

Many blog owners spend hours - or days - composing a new post.

Occasionally, we see the complaint in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken

I had been working on my post, for days. Just as I accidentally erased everything, AutoSave kicked in, and saved my empty post. Now, I have to spend days rewriting!

Given the right reflexes, and presence of mind, recovery is simple. Most browsers provide an "Undo" command, which will back out the erasure of the contents - as long as you react properly. Just hit "Undo" - and you're back in business.

If using "Undo" is a problem for you, avoid AutoSave. As soon as you have a basic post written, publish the basic post. Then, edit what you just published.

Unless you have a lot of readers who read each new post, immediately - and who would be bothered by reading an incomplete post, this strategy will help you avoid problems generated by AutoSave.

Spend some time observing reader activity, using the visitor log / meter of your choice. Then consider

• How long it takes you, to publish a finished post.
• How many readers would typically read the post, during the time you spend publishing a finished post.
• How many readers would typically read the post, after you publish a finished post.
• How many more readers are you likely to get, if you can publish your posts without worrying about AutoSave ruining your efforts.
• How much easier it would be for you to publish, without dealing with the annoyances of AutoSave.

Unless you have more than a few readers who jump on each new post immediately after publication, you'll gain more, in the long run, by publishing sooner - if you have frequent problems with AutoSave.

This is another technique in progressive publishing. Publish sooner, and edit later.

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Blog Owners, Composing A Post, Seeing "Required field must not be blank"

We're seeing a few reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, from blog owners attempting to compose a new post, and seeing

Required field must not be blank

The problem appears to result from trying to compose a post, without first entering a Post title.

It appears that Blogger, trying to stabilise the post editor, is requiring non blank post titles, to save posts being composed. This includes the post being under effects of AutoSave, and the creation of Draft posts.

If you are composing a post, and seeing "Required field must not be blank", ensure that you are entering a valid Title to your new post.

As you enter this non appreciated new requirement, you may consider the requirement for Post Title uniqueness. A single space is accepted as a Title - but multiple posts, with the same Title, will result in duplicate titles, and an anti-duplication title suffix.

As an alternative to the single space, you may be able to hide the Title altogether, by adding custom CSS code.

.post-title.entry-title { display: none; }

If you have to change the Title before actually Publishing the post, you may be able to use the Permalink option, to change the URL to match the final Title.

We have a rollup discussion, where we are asking the people who are seeing this problem to provide details of what they are seeing, to help Blogger Engineering diagnose the underlying problem.

If you're willing to provide details, we ask that you be brief, polite, and on topic. Blogger Support needs objective statement of details - but using the rollup discussion to simply complain won't effectively encourage them to do anything.

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(Update 7/8): We're seeing reports that this problem has been fixed.

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