What Happens When You Publish

Blogging is a very 'right now' medium: when you hit 'Publish' on a post, it goes live to your blog right away.  In fact, a couple interesting things happen as soon as you hit the magic button.

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• The post appears at the top of your blog's home page.
• The post is added to your blog's archive, usually organize by date and subject.
• The post is added to your RSS feed, which is updated by newsreaders.
• An email is sent out to anyone who has signed up for e-mail notifications on your blog.
• If you have it set up, your blog will 'ping' blog search engines and services.
• and next time a search engine 'spider' crawls your blog, your new post will be indexed.

All of this happens without you having to think about it.  It's part of the reason Blogs are so effective - they can be publish and distributed very quickly with minimal effort from the blogger.  Blog software and services are designed to get your content around the internet quickly.

Of course, you can always edit your blog posts after you post them, and many bloggers do this when necessary (we'll talk ALOT about making and fixing mistakes later on - as well as some information on how to do corrections the right way).  The fact that an original post might be posted, delivered, read and emailed before you make your edits is part of the risk of hitting 'Publish'.  Editing after you post is a pretty tricky way of controlling your message.

Hitting Publish on a blog or webpage can have a few other consequences as well:

• Other bloggers might quote your post, expand on it, or reference it on their own blogs, creating permanent copies of your mistakes.
• Your blog might be linked to by blog services or search engines and even partially excerpted.
• Search engines might cache or archive your content either temporarily or permanently.
• You blog might get picked up by an Internet Archive such as the WayBack Machine.

Google has changed the way it's Search Engine finds and displays information, but previously a query could bring up the original article in question, along with websites or blogs that reference that article, sharing sites with that article and even a cached version.

None of this is meant to scare you - publishing to your blog is a great accomplishment!  You want the things described above to happen to you:  each process is designed to bring readers to your content and get your content in front of readers.  It's just best to be sure when you publish before you do.

Case in point: if your blog includes posts of a controversial, emotional, private, political or sensitive nature, read what you've written twice before publishing.

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