Publish a post and announce it

The mistakes that embarrass are all in the last ten minutes: a broken link, an unresized image, a title that is right on the page and wrong in the preview card. This is the order that catches them.

Before publishing

1. Read it once on a phone-width screen. Nearly every layout problem is there and nowhere else.
2. Check every link resolves, including the internal ones, and that none point at a staging host.
3. Check the metadata separately from the page: title, description, canonical URL, and the share image. These are what most readers see first and they are not visible while editing.
4. Check the images have alt text and are not several megabytes each.
5. Check the date and the author are the ones intended, and that it is not scheduled into the past.

Publish

Publish, then load the live URL — not the preview — and read the top of the page. Then paste the URL into one place that renders a preview card and look at what appears. A wrong share image is the single most visible publishing mistake and the only way to find it is to look.

Announce

• Internally first, one Slack message with the link, so the team sees it before customers ask about it.
• In the newsletter, if this post is one of the ones that goes out — with the post's own opening sentence, not a new one written hurriedly.
• Anywhere else on the agreed schedule.

Each announcement is one message with the link and one line saying who it is for. Not a summary of the post: the post is the summary.

Stop and ask

• Before publishing anything naming a customer, quoting a person, or announcing a feature that is not yet live for everyone.
• Before changing the URL of a post that is already published. That needs a redirect, and the redirect is part of the change.