Blogger: keeping current time on posts

A Consuming Experience

Blogging, internet, software, mobile, telecomms, gadgets, technology, media and digital rights from the perspective of a consumer / user, including reviews, rants and random thoughts. Aimed at intelligent non-geeks, who are all too often unnecessarily disenfranchised by excessive use of tech jargon, this blog aims to be informative and practical without being patronising. With guides, tutorials, tips - and the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

Blogger: keeping current time on posts

Sunday, October 02, 2005

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Just wanted to draw attention to a tool I use, which I should have mentioned earlier. If you create a post on Blogger, and you save it as a draft and go back to it later, or you just leave it open but take your time publishing it, the published post is stamped with the time when you originally hit the "Create" button. Not the time when you hit "Publish Post".

This was annoying, especially if I'd saved a draft - the post wouldn't appear at the top of my blog's main page if the draft was created a while ago and I'd made other posts since, but would appear against the original date when I created the draft. (If you have ever been puzzled about where a post might have got to when you hit Publish and couldn't see it anywhere obvious in your blog, that's why!)

So it was great when I hit on a Greasemonkey extension for Firefox users by Browservulsel, which makes the post take on the current time, i.e. the time when you publish it, not the time you created it. However this involved adding a "Keep current time" checkbox above the time and date of your post (under the main box), where the box wasn't ticked by default - and silly me, I kept forgetting to tick it, so I still had the same ol' problem. Fortunately Browservulsel listens to his users - I made a request for the box to be ticked by default, and he kindly changed it to do that.

If you're a Blogger user and have Firefox, I'd suggest you go get yourself the "Blogger keep current time user script" - I think it's invaluable and it's saved me much irritation and time. (And if you don't know about Greasemonkey, see this post on what Greasemonkey scripts are and how to install them). If you're already using an old version of the script where the box is UNticked by default, you should uninstall it and install the new version.

UPDATE: Aditya's now produced a script that works on New Blogger, thanks Aditya!