User guide — all chapters
Where Details lives
The Details button in the composer holds everything about a post that isn’t the post. On the Mac it is the Post Details button in the toolbar, which opens a panel beside the editor.
None of it is required. A title and some words are enough. But this is where a post becomes a properly addressed page. Everything here saves itself, as your words do.
Draft, published or scheduled
| Field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Status | Draft or Published. A draft is never built into your site and never uploaded. This is the switch that decides whether the world sees a post. |
| Publish Date | The date shown on the post, and the one that orders your home page and feeds. Set it back to backdate a post. Set it forward to schedule one. |
Scheduling a post
Mark a post Published and give it a later date. It stays off your site until that day, then goes out at the first publish from that day on. The posts list labels it Scheduled, and the review on the publish screen lists it too.
Selfish has no server, so nothing can publish for you on the day. Instead it reminds you that morning, at nine in your site’s time zone, with a Publish Now button on the notification. A Shortcuts automation can publish without asking.
The address
| Field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Slug | The last part of the post’s address. Leave it empty and Selfish makes one from the title while you write a new post. |
| Old Addresses | Shown for a post that has some, as imported posts do: where it was before, one per line. Links to those addresses lead here once your site lives where the old one did. |
Once a new post has been closed, its slug stays put. Renaming a post later does not move its page, which is the right default: links you have already shared keep working. If you do want the address to change, edit Slug yourself, and remember that the old address then stops working. Two posts that would produce the same slug get -2, -3 and so on, so one page never silently replaces another.
By default a post is published at /posts/my-post.html. Site Settings → Site → Post Pages → Addresses without .html changes that to /posts/my-post/. How publishing works explains what to check before switching.
How it is described
| Field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Search & Social Description | The summary shown in search results and link previews. Left empty, Selfish uses the first lines of the post. |
| Listing Excerpt | What your home page, archives and feeds show in place of the post’s opening lines. It is also the post’s description in search results when you haven’t written one above. |
| Category | One per post, chosen from the categories you have made for the site. |
| Tags | As many as you like. |
Category and Tags appear once the site has some. Make them in Categories & Tags.
On your site: pin it, or keep it off the lists
Under On Your Site:
- Pin to the top of the home page. The post leads your home page, and its date line says “Pinned”.
- Show on the home page, archives and feeds. Turn this off and the post is unlisted: it stays published for anyone with its address, but it is left out of your home page, archives, category and tag pages, feeds, the sitemap and site search.
Under Search Engines:
- Let search engines list it. Turn this off to ask search engines not to list the post or page.
- A field marked first published at. If the piece first appeared somewhere else, give that address and search engines are told to credit it as the original.
Series
Give posts the same name under Series and each of their pages lists every part, in order, marking the one the reader is on. Names you have already used are offered, so a series stays spelled the same way.
Share a draft before it is published
Share Before Publishing → Share this draft gives a draft an address no one could guess. Publish your site, send the address, and someone can read the post before it is public.
- Search engines are asked to stay away from it.
- The address appears nowhere else on your site: not on any page or feed, not in the record Selfish keeps of what is published, and not in a server’s folder listing.
- The page comes down at the next publish after you stop sharing, or after you publish the post properly.
It needs your site’s address to be set, and it works for posts scheduled for later as well as drafts.
On GitHub Pages the shared draft is also a file in your repository. If the repository is public, anyone browsing it can find the draft. Selfish says so when you turn sharing on.
Index thumbnail, link cards and history
Three more sections are covered where they belong:
- Index Thumbnail chooses the photo that represents the post in listings. See Photos, video and audio.
- Link Cards turns a link on a line of its own into a card. See Link cards.
- History opens the post’s earlier versions.
What a page has
A page has the same Details with less in it: status, date, slug, description, the search engine options, old addresses, link cards, sharing before publishing, and history. Pages have no category, tags, listing excerpt, series or thumbnail, and they are never pinned or listed among your posts.