As I said in my previous post New Blogger June 2008 - The Post Editor, the changes offered to us, today, represent the first major overhaul since December 2006. Of course, I overlooked the rollout of Draft Blogger, without which this update would not be possible.
So, having looked at the Post Editor, let's look at Settings, where we see changes in the Basic and Comments tabs.
There are interesting changes in Basic. We have the promised "Import blog" - "Export blog" links. And next to that, a major change - "Delete blog", which now leads to a Delete your blog confirmation screenThis will permanently delete your blog including all posts. You can create another blog at this address using the Google Account you're currently logged in with, however, we can't restore your blog posts once you choose to delete your blog.
Before you delete your blog, do you want to export it ?
Comments gets a possibly popular improvement. "Comment Form Placement" now has a third option - "Embedded below post". Embedded comments is a long awaited improvement.
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Occasionally, someone asksHow can I require approval of any post before it's published?
and my typical answer will beYou can't, using the post editor. Any author can publish a post, and you can only moderate posts after the fact.
The key words there are "post editor".
If you enable Mail-to-Blogger in Settings - Mobile and email, you can have your authors email their posts, unpublished, to you.
You use the Mail-to-Blogger setting, and you publish posts when you approve.
If you set Mail-to-Blogger to save emails as draft posts, all posts emailed will be saved for you to moderate.
In the dashboard Settings - Email page, set "Posting using email" to "Save emails as draft post".
You, or any administrator, can examine draft posts from the Edit Posts menu - and publish only the ones that meet your approval.
Combine GMail and Mail-to-Blogger lets you automate your tasks.
If you use a GMail account to filter and forward to MTB, you can selectively route posts from specific individuals for moderating, and others can post directly.
This allows you to use your time more effectively, only moderate possible problem authors, moderate more effectively, and respond more promptly. If you can respond more promptly, you can selectively moderate based upon need, not just current workload.
Maintain some students as trusted - and keep a close watch on the others.
You can change individual author moderation policy on a moments notice.
Setup 2 Blogger accounts for your blog, each with a different MTB policy (Account A to post after moderation, Account B to post without moderation). Have your authors email their posts to a special GMail account.
Setup the GMail account with a series of email filters, with each author email forwarding to the appropriate Blogger account MTB email address.
Any individual author can be selectively changed between moderation and no moderation, by simply changing the email filter to redirect to Account A or Account B, respectively. You spend your time moderating only authors posting through Account A.
You can publish the posts under the student names, using multiple Blogger accounts.
If you want to publish the posts under the individual author names and profiles, setup individual Blogger accounts, as blog authors - one for each author - and only give the authors the Mail-to-Blogger email addresses. Then, as above, setup each Blogger account to save emails as draft posts.
Since you will be the actual owner of each Blogger account, setup the accounts with secure names and passwords - and keep track of the account names and passwords. Then, moderate the ones who need your attention.
Just observe that posts composed and submitted, using email, won't be as complete and well formatted, as posts composed in post editor. You may have to add content and formatting, before publishing.
Recently, we noted the ability of blog Authors to setup their own Mail-to-Blogger access code to a given blog.
As a blog Author (aka "Guest" member), you will note a new Setting tab - "Email", where you now have the ability to setup your own Mail-to-Blogger address - with the public portion of the address set as your normal MTB public address. This is the same feature, that you may have enjoyed on your own blog, as an administrator / owner.
Presumably, you set the private portion of the address to a unique value, which then routes any MTB posts using the "public.private@blogger.com" (aka "account.password@blogger.com") email address to this blog.
We can now post to our blogs, and use MTB with Author identified, instead of anonymous (or name of the blog owner only). Remember, you can change only the "password" (private) portion of the address. The "account" (public) portion is set as a function of your Blogger account, and can't be changed.
Blog administrators have always had this setting, now blog authors have it too. It's right there, in Settings - "Mobile and email", under "Email" - "Posting using email". You can only change the "private" portion of the MTB email address ("secretWords"), then you simply email your posts using "public.private@blogger.com", where the combination of "public.private" is unique for every blog that uses MTB for posting.
This should give us a nice way around the Blogger limit of 100 blog members. Multiple Authors can share a single MTB address (maintained by the administrator), if the blog Member list exceeds 100 entries. Or, with all blog members having their own unique MTB address, everybody can post and be identified.
How you maintain an array of different MTB private addresses, given that you might use MTB for multiple blogs, will be another subject to be addressed.
