Undelete deleted posts

HALLELUJAH

New this past month: Undelete. For posts and pages.

I do not apologize for feeling giddy about this.

Deleted posts now go to the "trash" for 90 days. They sit there with an unpublished status. 

While they sit, they can be restored at their previous web addresses and dates. After 89 days in the trash, they are gone. 

It was Apple Computer who originated the trash-can metaphor in the 1980s. Deleted files would go there and be recoverable.

But Blogger just gave one option: delete immediately, and permanently.

This month, Blogger has moved boldly into the computer world of 40 years ago.

Here are some things to know about how this works.

It's pretty much what you expect

Hover your pointer over the trash icon for a published post (on your Posts page). The pop-up text now reads "Move this post to trash."

(Don't see the trash icon? Hover your pointer over the post.)

Do the same thing for an unpublished post. The trash-can icon has a small x in it, and the pop-up says, "Discard this post."

That's right, you can't put drafts in the trash. Clicking this icon will delete them with no recovery option.

Use the revised filtering menu to see what's in the trash.

Open the trash and see what is there by choosing "trash" from the pull down filtering menu at upper left. From there, posts have four options: publish, remove from trash as draft, preview, and delete for good.

Left to right: publish, revert to draft, delete forever, preview.

Google calls this option "permanently delete" while for draft posts (not shown) the same thing is called "discard." But both are utterly permanent.

Blogger automatically deletes items that have been in the trash for more than 89 days. This cannot be undone.

The rectangular post listing in the trash shows the number of days until permanent deletion, at bottom left.

Pages too. The same applies to static pages.

There's more to know

Publishing a trashed post directly restores everything as it was, including the previous url, publication date, and any comments. It is a full restore

It also preserves the post's view count, Blogger's imperfect tracking of page views. The post's sub-page on Blogger's Stats page remains live even while the post is in the trash.

Restoring to draft also preserves all of that, but resets the date to the current one. You can change it to whatever you like, but Blogger won't remember the original date for you.

There's still no separate trash for comments. Deleting a comment from your blog directly (for instance, from the Comments page of your dashboard) still cannot be undone.

While in the trash, posts can't be edited. If you try, Blogger will ask you if you want to move the post from trash to draft.

You also can't make any changes to labels in the trash. Trashed posts are not included in the "All" category on the filtering menu.

Published posts can only be deleted by the two step process of trashing and then deleting from trash (which is permanent). There is no direct "delete for good" option.

For team blogs, authors can only manage their own deleted posts. They can see all posts, and administrators can manage all posts.

Scheduled posts (for publication in the future) are considered published posts and the trash can applies. 

If you publish a scheduled post directly from the trash, it will become a scheduled post again if the publication date is still in the future.

If you have multiple blogs, and if you republish a trashed post in one of them, the blog will bump to the top of the list of three most recent blogs on your blog menu.

What this isn't

This is not universal undo. 

We still need version control of posts, and an end to the traumatic (and usually irreversible) erasure of posts by Blogger's autosave if your hand twitches and deletes the contents of a draft you are working on.

It still stinks that if you accidentally delete a comment you cannot reverse that even if you act right away.

By contrast, if you mark a comment as spam, it goes in a virtual trash can and can be published to your blog years later, if you don't subsequently delete it.

But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.

This is the first new feature that people have actually asked for since The New Blogger back in 2020. Which, come to think of it, nobody asked for either.

This one has been on my wish list for years.