Writing a post

Posts › New post opens an empty editor. A title, a body, and a sidebar of everything else. Nothing is published by pressing Save.

The four states

Draft is yours. It is not on the blog, it is not in the feed, and it is not in the sitemap. You can still share it: a draft has a preview link that carries a signed token, so somebody without a Rankbench account can read it and nobody who guesses the address can.

In review is a draft somebody has finished and handed over. It notifies the people who can publish, which is the whole reason the status exists. A draft nobody is told about is a draft sitting in a list nobody opens.

Scheduled is a post with a date in the future. It goes out on the five-minute cycle, in your blog's time zone. Nothing has to be open for it to publish.

Published is live. The address works, the feed carries it, the sitemap lists it, and any other part of Rankbench that wants to link to it can.

Unpublishing takes a post back to draft. It leaves the feed and the sitemap, and its address stops answering, so if the post had readers it is worth adding a redirect on the Redirects tab pointing the old address at whatever replaces it.

The body

The toolbar has what a post needs: headings, bold and italic, links, lists, quotes, code, a horizontal rule, pictures, and embeds.

Pictures come from the media library or straight from your machine. Either way they land in the library, so the same picture used in two posts is stored once.

An embed is a paste. Drop a YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Spotify, SoundCloud, CodePen, Figma, Canva or Google Docs address on its own line and it becomes the embed. Anything from a host that is not on the allowed list is removed when the page is drawn, which is why the Settings code tab has a box for adding hosts you trust.

The editor saves as you type and keeps a version every time you save. See History, below.

The sidebar

Address is the post's slug. It is filled in from the title and you can change it. Change it after publishing and the old one becomes a redirect automatically, so a link somebody already shared keeps working. This is worth knowing before you tidy up an old slug: you are not breaking anything.

Checks reads the post as it stands: whether the title fits in a search result, whether there is a description to show under it, whether the post is long enough to answer a search on its own, whether it has section headings, whether every picture and the cover have alt text, and whether it links to anything else on the blog. Two of them are errors rather than advice, and they are the two a post cannot be published without: a title, and an address. The rest you can ignore and publish anyway.

Excerpt is the summary used on the front page, in the feed and, if you leave the search description empty, in search results. Left blank, the first couple of sentences are used.

Cover picture is the image at the top of the post and the one that appears when the post is shared. Alt text belongs on it.

Author picks from the blog's authors. An author is a name, a picture, a line of biography and an optional link, and every author has a page listing what they wrote.

Categories and Tags do different jobs. A post has few categories, and they structure the blog: they appear in the navigation and each has its own page and feed. Tags are cheap and many, and they group across categories. Both have their own pages, both are in the sitemap.

Search and social is the title and description a search result and a shared card will use, with a live preview of both. Leave them empty and the post's own title and excerpt are used, which is usually right.

Layout is per-post: whether the cover runs full width, whether the table of contents shows, whether the author box appears at the end.

Code for this post injects into this page and no other. For an embed that needs a script, or a one-off tracking pixel.

History is the last twenty saves, each with its date and why it was saved, and a Restore link. Restoring makes a new save rather than winding the history back, so restoring the wrong one is itself undoable.

When something else edits your post

Two things here can write to a post that is already yours: the content calendar, when it publishes an article you have since edited, and a guest author resubmitting after publication.

Neither overwrites what you wrote. If nobody has touched the post since the last time it synced, it is updated in place. If somebody has, the new version is filed as a suggestion and the post is left exactly as you left it. The editor then shows a banner and the two versions side by side, because "keep yours or take theirs" is an impossible question without seeing both.