I just finished an article series on the Blog Herald on Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog.

The series is stuffed with blogging tips, as well as many tips for using WordPress, both as a replacement for your newsletter and how to use it for a small business or membership association.

Here are some of the specifics I covered.

Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog Series

• Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog: Introduction to the series and covers pulling Page content, semi-static blog content, from the newsletter columns and content, leaving the rest as posts.
• Newsletter to Blog: Turning Article and Reports Into Blog Posts: Covers determining which content within the blog goes where and how as blog posts rather than newsletter columns. Begins to look at how content is categorized on a blog.
• Newsletter to Blog: Establishing The Post Categories: Moving from newsletter columns to categories for categorizing the blog content was more challenging than originally thought. I cover how the group rearranged and renamed their blog categories in an effort to help members find related content easily, but also help searchers find information of value to them.
• Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part I: The newsletter was published over the years in Microsoft Word and Publisher, which made converting the newsletter content to blog content a bit frustrating. In two parts, I covered the struggles of the conversion and offered tips to speed up the process.
• Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part II: Part two on converting the newsletter into blog post content, including a lot of tips for problems that come with the WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor in WordPress.
• Newsletter to Blog: Quoting, Referencing, Citing, and Not Copyright Violating: Members had to be taught how to quote, reference, cite, link, and not violate copyrights as they transferred content from the newsletter to the blog, then continue publishing on the blog.
• Newsletter to Blog: Blogger’s Friend - The Text Editor: Since much of the newsletter content, links, bits and pieces were redundant, I introduced the group to the benefits of using a text editor to help build their blog content.
• Newsletter-to-Blog: Converting Old Newsletters and The Benefits of Conversion: In conclusion, the newsletter team decided to convert their older newsletters into PDF files, and learned a lot of benefits for having a blog compared to just the printed and emailed newsletters, including re-energizing their membership.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

I fought for a long time to get Post Preview put into the Write Post Panel of WordPress. We were so thrilled. Prior to that, we had to have at least two browser windows open, one with the Write Post Panel and the other with the preview of the post in the WordPress Theme. Now, with one click of the “jump” link, the user could jump down to the preview or jump back up to the editing section, and get the real live view of what your blog post looked like when published.

Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, WordPress removed the jump link. Users were forced to scroll down manually to see the preview. New users couldn’t figure out why their Write Post panels were taking so long to load when they clicked Save and Continue Editing. Until they just happened to scroll down and see the preview. Surprise!

Then WordPress.com removed the post preview, and the removal went into the full version - and a lot of veterans were not happy. A link was added to open a preview in a new window or tab, but that caused it’s own confusion. If you have a lot of tabs open, the preview opens at the end of the row, which you may or may not be able to see or easily access if you aren’t using a extension or option to permit multiple tab rows. I had one user open up over a dozen tabs of her post preview when she kept clicking, thinking she wasn’t doing it right.

The excuse given for removal of the post preview was to save bandwidth and complaints of slow page loading. Hmm, let’s see. When you Save and Continue Editing, you consume bandwidth. Now you have to open the preview in a new tab/window, which consumes bandwidth and loads a full view of your blog post in the WordPress Theme. And increases your waiting time as you wait for each page to reload each time you make a change. Equals out to me, doesn’t it to you? That is, unless you are one of those who just writes and hits Publish, then fixes things later.

I say, you want to save bandwidth, clean up the bandwidth page loading and reloading with comments and put the post preview back so we can see what our posts really look like before we hit Publish, in my humble opinion.

The WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor does not allow you to really see what your blog post will look like when published in your WordPress Theme. It gives you an “idea”, but not the actual look. If you by accident use the wrong heading tag or mess up a link or list, you may not really see it until it published. So checking a preview of your post is critical to catch the boo boos before they appear on your blog.

So how do you work more efficiently with the Post Preview system as it stands now?

WordPress Post Preview Tips

For those using the full version of WordPress, you can put the Post Preview back into your WordPress Write Post Panel with the Preview Frame WordPress Plugin or Wordlog Restore Post Preview WordPress Plugin. Quick Online Tips offers more on how to put the Post Preview back in place.

For the rest of us, we’re stuck with playing the Tab Game.

In your browser, preferably Firefox, open three tabs:

1. WordPress Administration Panels: This is your gateway to your Administration Panels, for you to write and edit posts, check comments, stats, and other administrative tasks.
2. Draft Post Preview Page: On this tab is your blog post, which we will use to put the link to view your draft post.
3. Your Blog Front Page: On this tab, you will have access to all your blog posts.

Working with Post Preview: Start your post draft in tab one, on the Write Post panel. After you click Save and Continue Editing, you have two choices to put the Post Preview link in tab two.

1. Right click and copy the link location from the Post Preview link and paste it into tab two. Hit enter to load the draft of your post in your WordPress Theme.
2. Or, notice the ID number of the post and switch to tab two and type in the ID number in the form: example.com/?p=25. Hit enter to load the draft of your post.

This will allow you to preview your post, switching back and forth between the two tabs to make any changes in the editing process. When you need to see the new version, click Save and Continue Editing in tab one, switch to tab two and do a full refresh/reload of the page to see the changes.

When happy, hit Publish.

Working With Tab Three: Entrance to Your Blog: Most blog posts get their most comments when they are new. Thus, they are often listed on your blog’s front page. When you see a comment that needs a response in tab one of your three open tabs to your blog, and it should still be on your blog’s front page, switch to tab three and find the post and click the title to access it, scrolling down to the comments, and respond.

If the post is older, you have two options from the Comments Panel:

1. From the comment on the panel, right click on View Post or the Post Title and copy the link location (address). Switch to tab three and paste it into the address bar. Hit enter to load the page.
2. Right click on View Post or the Post Title and open the link in a new tab. In Firefox, click CTRL+Page Up or CTRL+Shift+TAB in IE to move up through the tabs, which will take you to the last tab opened. Scroll down to the comments and respond. Close the tab when done and return to tab one for the next comment.

If you like opening multiple tabs to respond to all your comments on the different posts at once, like I do, instead of going back and forth, you can go down the comment’s panel and open up a new tab from each comment’s post link. Then move up to the last tab opened, reply, and close that tab, and go on to the next, and next, and next. It’s a lot of opening and loading of windows, wasting a ton of bandwidth, but until we have fast and easy AJAX commenting that allows us to comment without reloading or opening multiple web pages.

If you have the full version of WordPress, you can take advantage of the DigitalRamble Admin Panel Comment Reply Plugin or Ajax Comments WordPress Plugin. That will save some bandwidth and make commenting MUCH easier.

The Downside of the Tab Game

The downside of playing this tab game is that I have two to three tabs open for each of my blogs and the blogs I contribute to regularly. Currently, that number is five. Five times three is 15. Fifteen tabs open all the time in order to manage my five blogs. That’s a lot of tabs to start with at a minimum every time I start Firefox.

Before the loss of the built-in Post Preview, I had two tabs open for each blog. That’s 10 tabs. Not bad, but better.

The loss of the built-in Post Preview for WordPress.com bloggers has been painful for many. Personally, I’ve actually increased my bandwidth consumption, and time wasting. The Blog Herald still offers the built-in Post Preview, which saves me a ton of time and tabs, and loads fairly fast, including all the ads they have on their site. I’m finding that I’m publishing posts faster on the Blog Herald than I am here on WordPress.com.

Do you have a better idea or tip for handling the lack of a good Post Preview in WordPress?

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.