A few momentary outages today as I kept breaking things. When posting you can now set the post to 'pending' in addition to 'preview'. If you choose pending you must enter a publication date in the 'pending date:' box. This date has to be in the exact format

yyyy/mm/dd 24:00

Thats the full 4 digit year followed by the two digit month (01 = january) followed by the two digit day (01 for the first of the month.) Then one space, then the 24 hour east coast time (16:30 = 4:30 pm eastern time.)

The post will be invisible until that time, at which point the following page load will publish the pending post. The 'posted by' footer will contain the date and time you entered into 'pending date:'.

- jim 11-18-2001 10:32 pm

This is a useful feature for me, because I often change things over a period of days, and simply previewing it never gives enough time for that kind of indecisive revision. But to do that, I'd need to be able to retrieve the pending post.

So, I just tried it, on an experimental basis, on my page. I set the post for 2001/12/15 12:15 (I think), wrote two words, and hit the pending and post buttons. Now the post is invisible, and I want to change the date and add text. How do I retrieve it?
- tom moody 11-19-2001 1:32 am [add a comment]


  • Oh sure. It's always something else that people want.

    Still, I guess you are correct.

    Should it appear like a preview post (seen by you, in green, but not by others?) That way you could post it, see it, and edit it, but nobody else could see it until the date.

    Really, I thought only Alex would find this useful, as I know he sometimes wants a post to fall on a certain date even though he might write it a day or two before hand.

    My other use, which isn't finalized yet, is that this will let us make a sort of calendar, so that you can program items in the future which will show up as [new posts] on the main page on their dates (for instance, I can program in a reminder for MB's birthday, and on the day before, when I load the main page, there will be a [new post] on some 'datebook' page of mine reminding me of this important event.)

    But maybe there are other uses as well. It's a simple idea that might turn out to be quite powerful. Is my idea of making a still pending 'pending post' appear like a 'preview post' a good one?
    - jim 11-19-2001 6:17 am [add a comment]


    • Whoops. I guess I should have experimented with the preview feature before making recommendations about the pending feature. I confess I haven't used the preview mode for fear that what I wrote couldn't be saved indefinitely, which is the case with say, amazon previews or previews in Yahoo clubs.

      Just so I'm clear, if I write something in preview mode and hit post, it appears on my page indefinitely, invisible to all but me, to be tinkered with ad nauseum, until I hit "edit" and "post"? If that's the case, I wouldn't need to use the pending feature to do that. Sorry.
      - tom moody 11-19-2001 6:37 am [add a comment]


      • Yeah, that's what preview does. I guess some documentation of all this might help. Probably Alex is the only one who might use pending (so the equinox post shows up exactly on the equinox, say, without him having to hang around the house for the exact minute in order to post it himself.) But with a few more additions I'm going to use pending to make a sort of reminder feature so that I can post messages (on a private page maybe) to myself that will appear at certain points in the future to remind me of things. Like a datebook that knows where it is in time.
        - jim 11-19-2001 5:44 pm [add a comment]






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