Blog posts
Go to Writing → Posts and press New post. A post has:
- a Title, and a Slug for its web address, filled in from the title;
- a Status, Draft or Published;
- Publish at: the date the post is dated, and the time it goes out (see scheduling, below);
- Tags, to group posts by subject;
- an Excerpt, shown on the blog index and in the feed. Leave it empty to use the opening of the post;
- a Cover image, if you like;
- and the post itself, under The post, with bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, two levels of heading, quotations and lists.
Your published posts appear on your site’s blog, at yourname.draftmargin.com/blog, newest first. Blog appears in your site’s menu as soon as you have published one. The Preview button on a post opens it as readers will see it, drafts included, through a private link that works for an hour.
Scheduling a post
Set the Status to Published and Publish at to a date and time ahead. The post stays off your site, its feed and its sitemap until then, and appears on its own at that moment. Times are UTC. Scheduled posts are listed under Coming up on your dashboard, soonest first, until they go out.
A post left as a Draft never goes out, whatever its date, so check the Status when you schedule one.
Tags
Give a post its tags in the Tags box: choose existing ones, or create a new one from the same box. Writing → Tags lists them all, to rename them. On your blog, readers can choose a tag to see only the posts that carry it.
Pages
Pages are for what stays put: an About page, a page of frequently asked questions, a reading-group guide, a privacy note. Go to Site → Pages and press New page. A page has a Title, a Slug, a Status, and its text, under The page.
- A page lives at your site’s address followed by its slug, such as yourname.draftmargin.com/about.
- Link from the header adds it to your site’s menu. About belongs there; a privacy policy probably does not. Position in the header sets its place among the other pages, lowest first.
- A few addresses are already used by your site, such as books, blog, contact and links. If you pick one, you are asked to choose another.
A site can have 20 pages, besides your books and posts. See safety limits if you need more.
Your site’s menu
You do not build the menu yourself: your site makes it from what you have. Books appears once you have a Published book, Blog once you have a published post, then the pages you link from the header, then Contact, and Sign in for readers (or Library, for a Member who is signed in).
Your feed
Your site has a feed at yourname.draftmargin.com/feed, which readers can follow in a feed reader or an app such as Feedly. It carries your newest posts and Open chapters, 25 at a time, each with its title, date and a short extract. Scheduled posts and chapters join it when they go out; Members chapters and drafts never do. Each book has its own feed of new chapters too: see books and series.
Many newsletter services can send an email automatically from a feed. If yours can, point it at your feed and every new post reaches your list without you sending it.
Links in your writing
Links you add in posts, pages and chapters work as usual for readers. Each is marked “nofollow” for search engines, as are your buy buttons, as on most sites that host other people’s writing: it tells search engines not to treat the link as an endorsement, which takes away any reason for spammers to put links here. It does not change how your own site is found.
Still stuck, or found something wrong on this page? Contact support.