draftBlogger : Better Post Previews

 This morning, I found Blogger in Draft (May 16, 2010) published details of the enhancements to the post preview feature of our blogs which enables us to see how our posts will look to readers

As we know, when we preview a post we are writing for  Blogger , we have seen only a white background, format-less version of our musings, with none of the formatting and visual style which is added by our template and CSS.

With this new feature in place, we can see preview exactly what the post will look like when published, including any style attributes generated by our template code.

This enhancement works similarly to the preview system offered by the Edit HTML template editor; rather than have a pop-up display, the preview is generated in a new browser tab or page, depending on which browser you are using. Simply click the "Preview" button, which now appears beneath the post editing section to see this new feature in action.  The updated post preview feature is available to those using Blogger in Draft to publish their posts.

I find this particularly useful when deciding which size of images to use in my blog posts as I can see exactly how the post will be formatted when the style generated by my templates is applied. The only possible problem you may face when using this feature is if you customize the display of posts on the home page (for example, if you use conditional tags to add content/alter the layout of posts). You will see how your post would appear on the home page of your site, not on an individual item page. So if your template features customizations which affect the display of posts, you may not be able to see properly how your post will be formatted.

Please note that the preview page does not automatically update as the contents of the post changes. To make sure the post looks OK after you've done further editing, you can refresh the preview page manually, or click the Preview button again.