Refining Your Post Options

This option is otherwise known as a sticky post. Typically, posts are

displayed in chronological order on your blog, displaying the most
recent post on top. If you make a post sticky, it remains at the very top,
no matter how many other posts you make after it. When you want
to unstick the post, deselect the Stick This Post to the Front Page
check box.
✦ Password Protected: By assigning a password to a post, you can publish
a post to your blog that only you can see. You can also share the post
password with a friend, who can see the content of the post after he
or she enters the password. But why would anyone want to password-
protect a post? Imagine that you just ate dinner at your mother-in-law’s
house and she made the worst pot roast you’ve ever eaten. You can
write all about it! Protect it with a password and give the password to
your trusted friends so that they can read all about it without offending
your mother-in-law. Figure 1-7 shows a published post that’s private;
visitors see that a post exists, but they need to enter a password in the
text box and then click Submit in order to view it.

✦ Private: Publish this post to your blog so that only you can see it — no

one else will be able to see it, ever. You may want to protect personal
and private posts that you write only to yourself (if you’re keeping a per-
sonal diary, for example).

✦ Publish Immediately: Click the Edit link to make the publish date

options appear, where you can set the timestamp for your post. If you
want the post to have the current time and date, ignore this setting
altogether.
If you want to future-publish this post, you can set the time and date
for anytime in the future. This feature has come in handy for Lisa many
times. For example, when you have a vacation planned and you don’t
want your blog to go without updates while you’re gone, you can write
a few posts and set the date for a time in the future. Those posts are
published to her blog while you’re somewhere tropical, diving with the
fishes.
✦ Publish: This button wastes no time! It bypasses all the previous draft,
pending review, and sticky settings, and publishes the post directly to
your blog immediately.
After you select an option from the Publish drop-down list, click the Update button. The Write Post page saves your publishing-status option.
If you click Publish and for some reason don’t see the post appear on the front page of your blog, you probably left the Status drop-down list set to Unpublished. Your new post appears in the draft posts, which you can find by clicking Edit in the Posts drop-down list.