Reverse Blog

Over the past year-ish I’ve turned this blog into more of a private journal, sometimes writing a public post here and there (from mostly public, with occasional private entries). I just updated Wordpress to version 2.3.2, which was long overdue, as I’d been running 2.0.9 for a very long time. Not much has changed, it seems, which is good in some ways (I didn’t have to touch my theme for the new version), and not so great in others (I was hoping for a couple new features, maybe stuff that I hadn’t even thought of but would find cool).

At any rate, I’d like something a bit opposite of what Wordpress currently offers. I want the default action to be post privately, with a separate button or setting I can hit to publish it. Currently it’s a little awkward. There’s a per-post “Post Status” setting, which can be one of Published, Pending Review (not sure what this does; 2.0.9 didn’t have it), Draft, and Private. The default is Draft, but that’s a little misleading. There are three buttons: Save and Continue Editing, Save, and Publish. The two Save buttons keep the Draft status. The Publish button acts like the Save button, but “helpfully” also sets Post Status to Published.

This UI is kinda confusing, and a bit prone to error: on more than one occasion I’ve published something I’ve wanted to keep private (fortunately no harm was done as I noticed the error quickly). I’m not sure what a better UI might be. One option is to just have two buttons: Save and Continue Editing, and Save. Then the Post Status field would always be maintained when clicking either of those buttons. As a consequence, the default Post Status would probably be Published. As a bonus, it would be great if the default Post Status were configurable. Then I could set it to Private and selectively change things to Published when I want to. Anyone know if there’s a way to achieve a similar effect (with Wordpress)?