Appreciation of Bear's post template
Bear has a little button on the posts page opposite 'new post' called 'edit template'. Which does indeed edit the template of the blog post editor. I don't do anything very exciting with the post template but what I do saves me so much time and hassle!
Here's how mine looks:
title:
link:
published_date: 2026-02-01 20:00
meta_description: Placeholder
tags: links,
___
As I said, simple. The published date is the first of the month. This helps keep all the drafts out of the way in one place not dotted among the days. Which is only relevant for monsters like me who write directly into the Bearblog editor. The time is set to eight o'clock in the evening. I don't know why, that was just whatever I chose at the time and I can change it if I like. Each month I update it, just to change the month.
The meta description placeholder reminds me to write a meta description, even though that doesn't currently appear anywhere on the site. It might in future. Similarly for tags, it reminds me to tag and it's set to my most common one. If there's no tag I just delete that line.
The template can handle a lot more than the attributes. People use the end of the post to add statuses, previous/next links, list of blog posts, guestbooks, comments, contact details, and so on. There's the footer to use too.
One of the most interesting implementations is Absurd Pirate who has previous/next links, a reply by email link, and then an 'as of writing this' section. There's a status.cafe log in the footer but I really like the 'as of writing this', which used to be a more formal wearing/feeling/listening to/playing rundown.
Rather than a status log that updates across the whole website a section like 'as of writing this' is attached to the post. It's a snapshot in time. It feels very old school, I remember it from LiveJournal. Was there something like that on MySpace? I like knowing what someone was listening to as they wrote. There are lots of status logs but using the post template is certainly the most straightforward.
And talking of Bearblog things, the Grizzly Gazette is holding a Creation Festival which is such a fun idea.