At LGF, we’ve long had the ability to schedule our front page articles for future posting, and now the new version of our LGF Pages posting app has the same ability. (In fact, it’s more polished than the feature in our admin app; I’m a bit jealous.)

First, if it wasn’t obvious, you need to have an LGF account and be signed into it for any of the following to make sense, so let’s just assume that’s already been done.

Here’s what the posting window looks like now, after selecting some text in a Washington Post article, clicking the bookmarklet, and editing some of the fields:

The new scheduling feature is in the set of controls at the bottom right — the checkbox labeled “Schedule,” oddly enough. If you click it, the “Publish” and “Save as Draft” radio buttons will vanish and be replaced with a text field and our date/time picker, which looks like this:

When you first enable the Schedule feature, the time is set to the current date, 1 hour ahead. Use the calendar and time picker features to set your desired posting date and time, in California Pacific time.

Notice that the “Submit” button now has an asterisk in it, to remind you that this Page is scheduled and won’t be posted right away.

On our server, scheduled Pages are published by a script that runs every five minutes. So be aware that the Page will probably not be published at the exact time you specify, but within a five minute window starting at that time.

Another new feature is on the other side of that bottom right control panel; in the screenshot above you see a checkbox labeled “Tweet” that controls whether this Page will be automatically posted on Twitter at the same time as it’s published at LGF.

The field labeled “Text” below that is a new feature, that lets you edit the text that will actually appear in your tweet. When you open the posting window, this field is a copy of the title field. But if you click inside it and type, you’ll see a small green checkbox appear next to it, like this:

When the checkbox appears, the “Text” field is no longer a copy of the title, and you can edit it to say whatever you’d like to appear in your tweet.

The “Tags” field below that is for any Twitter hashtags you’d like to include. To the right of the “Tags” field is the number of characters left in the tweet (Twitter’s maximum is 140 characters, as everyone in the universe probably knows.)

And there’s another new feature; if you have not connected your Twitter account to your LGF account in the “Account Settings” page yet, the left side of the bottom panel will look like this instead, with a button to let you easily sign in to Twitter for automatic tweeting of your Pages:

Clicking the button brings up the standard Twitter authorization window that you’ve probably seen before:

Authorize the LGF Connect app, and you’re all set; the window will close and the tweeting features will now appear in place of the prompt and “Connect to Twitter” button.

In order to make everything work we had to change the LGF Pages bookmarklet, so you’ll need to delete the old one from your browser’s bookmark bar, and then reinstall the new one by dragging the “LGF Pages” button (which has the new code) in our right sidebar to your bookmark bar.

Here’s the actual bookmarklet Javascript code; note that you can adjust the window’s width and height to fit your screen by editing the values in the section: “width=670,height=820”.

javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20s=(document.selection)?escape(document.selection.createRange().text):escape(document.getSelection());void(lgfwindow=window.open('http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?s='+s.replace(/%5C+/g,'%252B')+'&u='+escape(location.href)+'&t='+escape(document.title),'_blank','width=670,height=820,scrollbars=1,status=1,resizable=1'));lgfwindow.focus();%7D());