A Consuming Experience

It's annoying to publish a draft post on Blogger / Blogspot and then realise it's been dated not the date / time when you hit Publish, but when you first created the draft post, which could be days or, in my case, weeks or months ago!

That's one solution to the mystery of the disappearing draft post that you just published - it's just been filed away in the archives at the date and time of the draft post's original creation, that's why you can't see it on your main home page (unless of course you first created the draft quite recently).

Apart from having always to remember to fix the date / time before you click "Publish Post", which I'm terrible at doing, the only consistent easy solution I know of so far is Jasper's free "Keep current time" userscript for Firefox and Greasemonkey, which ensures your published post will always automatically bear the right date and time.

Jasper kindly updated it once, but come the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta, with its widgety goodness and enhanced developer-friendliness, it was Aditya who got the script working with the new Blogger code.

However, during the last month or so the user script has broken again, because of formatting changes behind the scenes at Blogger. When you go to edit a previously-saved draft post, the "Keep current time" box is no longer automatically ticked.

Aditya seems to have been offline for some months now, I assume with his studies, as there's been no activity on his blog for a while, and I've not been able to contact him about this script.

Fortunately Kirk has come to the rescue (as always) and fixed the script so that it now works again, thanks Kirk, mwah! Man I wish Google would roll out an API for Blogger and Greasemonkey, like they did for Gmail and Greasemonkey.

As Aditya's MIA I've uploaded the corrected script so that everyone can benefit from the fixes (Aditya please let me know if you've a problem with that): Get the updated Keep current time script.

How to get the script, for beginners to Blogger / Greasemonkey

• Get the free Firefox browser if you don't already have it ()
  
• Install the free Greasemonkey extension (how to install Greasemonkey add-on and Greasemonkey userscripts)
• Restart Firefox (there's a restart link in the File menu for instance)
• Then install the fixed Keep current time user script
• And that's it.
  

Labels: Blogger, Greasemonkey, technology

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