WordPress.com Debuts a New, Gimmicky Publishing Screen

WordPress.com is debuting a new publishing process that should make it easier to check out your post just as you've published it, but also to find out more about your readers from social networks. There are several tweaks and new tools for the entire process.

"For months we’ve been studying how, when and why people publish their posts, and what the common tasks are people perform afterwards. We know many of you immediately want to see what your post looks like, check for typos, and then share your post to social networks," WordPress.com explained.

"Starting today you’ll see a much improved design for giving you feedback and supporting how you work," it announced.

Immediately after publishing a new post, you'll get a notification saying that everything went smoothly as well as a counter showing how many posts you've published so far.

At the same time, the actual post loads on the right, so you can review it right away. Most of the time, this is when you'll spot a mistake or something you've overlooked.

If that is the case, which is more often than most people would like to admit, you can go straight back to editing the post, to polish any rough edges.

WordPress.com also introduced an interesting addition/gimmick, there is a "progress bar" which indicates how many more posts you have to publish to reach an arbitrary number, chosen in increments of five. There's also an inspiring quote below the bar for, well, inspiration.

Below the progress bar, you'll see how many people have, potentially, seen your post based on your WordPress.com followers as well as those on other social networks you may use. This only if you have the Publicize feature enabled, otherwise you get the option to share on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.