blogging / pinging / rss / publishing

reflexed — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:36:03 -0800

Can I use a desktop blogging client to upload posts but keep them 'Unpublished' in Movable Type? What exactly happens when Movable Type publishes? I'm looking for a desktop / browser blogging client to use with Movable Type 3.34 that will give me WYSIWYG editing, and I've got a couple questions about how Movable Type works.

I'd like something that will let me upload posts to the server but keep them with an 'Unpublished' status so that I can choose when to publish them later.

So far I've tried BlogJet, BlogDesk, ScribeFire, Ecto, and Windows Live Writer.

All (but Windows Live Writer) give you the option to upload post as a draft, but then within the Movable Type interface the post appears as published (however, it doesn't actually show until the site is rebuilt). If I actually publish the post in one of the clients, it appears on the front page.

So--a couple questions about how Movable Type works:

1. Is this behavior to be expected? (Someone was recently explaining to me that when you schedule a post to go up later, there's a bug in Movable Type and it won't actually appear until the site is rebuilt--this 'post as draft' behavior would seem to go along with that.)

2. As long as I post as draft and then switch to 'Unpublished', I should be fine as far as my posts not going out, right?

3. If I forget to publish as draft, and the post goes live, but then I immediately change it back to unpublished, will it still go out in my RSS feed? What's the time delay? (Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding the way RSS works--is the post only accessible if the person loads the feed that second it's live, but if they check later it won't be there?)

4. Same with the servers I'm pinging--if something goes live and I unpublish/delete it, does the ping still go out and just point back to nothing? Or does the ping die/negate itself?

5. And finally...which desktop / browser blogging client do you prefer?

Basically I don't want to pre-publish / annoy my readers when I use something other than the standard Movable Type interface to put posts on the server. I'm relatively new to Movable Type and blogging in general, so any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks hive mind!

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blogging / pinging / rss / publishing