Here's a tip for all you bloggers out there. Recently, we were excited to announce the addition of a new feature to the blogging engine called time-shifting. It allowed you to post-date a blog post for a day in the future. This feature has proven to be extremely helpful to me as I manage the content for our blog here at work, because it allows me to write and post thoughts as they are fresh on my mind with the most impact which is really helpful.
But this past Friday, I came across a challenge that I wanted to share with you all as something to look out for yourselves.
As you all know, we often do a light-hearted post at the end of the week called Casual Friday. What tends to happen for me is that throughout the week as emails flow in and out of my inbox and I check my Facebook feed from time-to-time, I come across funny videos online that would work for Casual Friday. With the new time-shifting feature, lately, as I've seen these videos, I've immediately dropped them into the blog engine for posting as a Casual Friday in weeks to come. Last Friday's post was one such post-dated video.
The problem was that the blog posted at 6 AM but in the time between when I had created the post in the system and when it posted, the video I had linked to on YouTube had been pulled for violation of terms. Since I wasn't tracking with the video regularly, I had no idea it was no longer available and the blog posted with a non-functioning video embedded in it.
So, the moral of the story is that I want to encourage you to check any external links and embedded content the day before it goes live on your blog. This will save you any last-minute scrambling to find an alternative that may or may not exist.
