I’ve been posting to my test blog by accident for the last month. 🤦🏾‍♂️

@mandaris Blogging like no one is reading. Literally 😁

@mandaris happened to me (for less long!). Test blogs might need another UX look: they should be private (I think @manton was working on adding meta robots tag) & hard to post to by default

@warner @mandaris Any suggestions for how to improve this? Also curious if it's less obvious in certain apps where the post is going to go.

@manton @warner In my case, I wasn’t paying attention. I think I had it set to my test blog and was trying to just get my thoughts out.

@manton @warner I started another post in the app and think the reason that I didn’t notice it was because I’m looking at the top (where my words are) and bottom (keyboard) of the screen. I think this is just a user thin for those who have multiple blogs. Maybe tint the blogname?

@mandaris @warner @manton That's occasionally happen to me as well. Not a test blog, but I've got a couple of other blogs hosted by Micro.blog alongside lmika.org, and I've accidentally posted to the wrong one.

I do have some thoughts for how Micro.blog can help here:

• An easy way to move posts between blogs such that the content and publish date could be preserved. A similar feature could be done for uploads as well, although I don't think that needs to happen when moving the post; I'm happy to move those separately.
• Maybe a way to set a "default blog" per client, so that when you go to create a new post, it defaults to a particular blog.

Anyway, just my $0.02.

@manton Being able to move posts would be nice. Write.as has this, and is very convenient for when you accidentally post to an unitnended blog.

these guys have great suggestions @manton, with the best being never allow a test blog to be the default blog when opening a native app (mine happened on Mac).

bigger-picture: test blogs should be search-unlisted by default and multi-blogs probably shouldn't even be a thing at all up to Premium: when you make a Twitter account they don't give you a 2nd @ to post to, as it's unnecessary complexity for beginners. The only use-case I can see for beginners is: you actually start on a test blog to do a Hello World post on for onboarding, and then choose when you want to start going live instead and save custom-domain option for then. Clearly as a sandbox it should definitely be search-unlisted, and possibly password-protected to view.

@warner Good point about unlisted. I never imagined that it would matter for test blogs because in theory they will never be linked anywhere. Google should never find them.

@manton naive to ever assume Google won't trawl all public content, but here's a plausible use-case if you need convincing:
posts link to test-blog for feedback on help.micro.blog, which (I also believe erroneously) is search-indexed.

Fear of permanent online presence is one of the biggest things that hold (especially young) people back from starting blogging.
I suspect its social-media's walled-garden features that give a (mainly false) sense of security that gets youth started.
I don't expect an open-web blogging tool like yours to look at login-wall or temp stories, but looking at how Instagram deindex individual images, and the popularity of private-accounts might be worthwhile, at least for anything sandbox or community-focussed setting like test-blogs and help.

It's in M.b interest too: given that test-blogs have by definition low-quality content, having these micro.blog subdomains indexed might interfere with main micro.blog search-rankings too.

@warner All good points. Thanks!