Publication Updates (and more)

Since we released our publications feature back in January, we have seen more and more of users take advantage of this awesome feature which enables you to quickly create and publish blogs without having to set up your own website on another provider.

With this increased usage, I have also received lots of feedback from users on ways to make publications better. Using this feedback we have made quite a lot of enhancements to publications over the past few weeks (in addition to some other important updates that are not necessarily publication related).

These updates include...

Social media link previews

When sharing blog posts from publications (or from your website), it's important that your links look good.

This is why I've recently added social media link previews that allow you to not only preview what your blog posts will look like when you share a link on various social media platforms, but also, you can customize how your links will look for specific social media platforms.

This option will show on all blog posts, but changes here will only affect when you share a link via your publication (i.e. these changes will not be included when you export a blog post).

You can access these options in your blog post side bar as shown below.

Read more about social media link previews in our docs here.

Create posts without video/audio for free

You can now create blank blog posts (i.e. blog posts that are not generated from a video or audio file) and they will not count toward your usage.

This allows you to take advantage of everything in our editor (AI edits, AI writer, AI images, stock image search, image editing, and more) to create blog posts from scratch.

While this update was made with publications in mind (because many times you just want to create a blog post not from a video), it is not exclusive to publications and can be used by all of our users.

To create a blog post from scratch click the ellipsis icon to the top right when creating a blog post and select the "Create blog post without video" option.

Read more about how to create blog posts from scratch in our docs here.

RSS feeds

All publications now come with an automatic built-in RSS feed. To access your feed add /rss to your publication's domain (i.e. https://YourPublication.com/rss).

Read more about RSS feeds in our docs here.

Announcement bar

You can create and enable announcement bars on your publication. This is a great way to notify your readers of any important announcements and/or updates.

To add an announcement bar to your publication click the "Customize" button next to the "Announcement bar" option in your publication settings.

This will bring up the Announcement Bar preview dialog where you can enable the announcement bar (by clicking the “Show Announcement Bar” option and customize the text of the announcement bar.

Read more about announcement bars in our docs here.

Publication language

You can now set your publication's language. This will tell Google (and other search engines) what language your publication is so it can serve them up to the correct audience.

You can set your publication's language in your publication settings.

Read more about publication language here.

Permanently delete blog posts 

This update is not related to publications, but is something that many users have been asking for a while: the ability to permanently delete blog posts. 

Previously, you could only archive blog posts.

Now, you can permanently delete blog posts and we will be deprecating the Archive feature (don't worry, if you have any archived blog posts you will still have the ability to see those archived blog posts).

Updated side bar design

Because of all these new features we've redesigned our blog side bar to not only provide a better and more unified experience between publications blog posts and non-publication blog posts, but to all create a simpler and more intuitive interface.

 

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Many more updates have been made for publications (and more) in the recent weeks, but those are the highlights.

All of these updates are immediately available to all users.

I will continue to improve publications based on all of the feedback I receive from our users and we will be having some really exciting updates in the coming months.