Section [A] is on repurposing published diaries. Section [B] is on repurposing old drafts in your drafts folder.
[A] Repurposing your old published diaries
[A.1.] Find your oldest worst, something you don’t mind deleting the text of and that has few or no recs or comments.
Diaries posted long ago, with disposable contents (i.e., material you don’t consider worth preserving) are the ones you want to pick among for repurposing. Best of all those are the ones neither reblogged to nor originally posted at any dk groups … unless you’re an admin at those groups and can go to their posting histories and click to REMOVE your diary from there, so it’ll only then be in your own posting history.
If it still actually got reblogged anywhere, you can always kosmail to a currently-active admin in that group & request they go into the group’s posting history to the date & title of yr item and click on the X at the right-hand column to delete it from the group’s diary list. But if it’s several years old, chances are 99% no one will ever notice anything diff about it anyway, no matter what you do with it, so it’s not absolutely necessary to get it ungrouped. This is a medium of the moment, after all.)
Diaries are recyclable because they’re almost infinitely re-editable. (Almost meaning I’ve re-edited some of mine well over 100 times and nothing has ever balked so far.) A re-edited diary keeps it’s original dating from system viewpoint, so it can’t jump to the top of your blogview or list page nor dk’s overall diary pages unless you fully unpublish and republish it, and you’re not doing that…
[A.2.] ...you’re just using the EDIT button/function to blank out the whole diary including title.
Put a new, memorable-to-yrself title on it —e.g., ▮▮▮Nothingish Emptytest (yes you can copy those blocks rite there)— and bookmark it in yr browser.
Strip out all tags and replace with just one that’s so meaninglessly cryptic that it’ll never be thought of or used as a tag by anyone else. E.g., nothingishemptytest.
Don’t worriez, you can easily check and revise that later, if need be, at the search page, where I just searched for “cwapdok” as a tag and got nuffink. Use google-search to test beforehand for a nice meaningless character string or as nearly as exists. if you want to make sure of your tag’s anonymity.
TO USE AS A HOTLIST, simply re-edit as often as you like, to put into it links of diaries you like or find useful —this one, maybe ;-) — plus maybe a few words to remind you what’s special about the diary, if the title isn’t clear on that.
TO USE AS A TESTING-POINT FOR SEEING HOW SOME TRICKY ASPECT OF SOME OTHER DIARY YOU’RE WORKING ON WILL REALLY LOOK AFTER POSTING/PUBLISHING, see [A.7.] below.
[A.3.] Hit SAVE DRAFT.
[A.4.] Hit PUBLISH CHANGES.
It’ll then ask if you’re “sure you want to publish this story now?”, displaying a CANCEL button in case you’re not ready, and a white-on-orange PUBLISH CHANGES to hit if you’re good to go.
In a moment you’ll find yourself looking at the public view of a published diary again, with the changes you made, be they diary links you saved, or the tricky bit of diarying you wanted to see in published form.
[A.5.] Bookmark it in yr browser.
You do want to be able to find it again, after all. (If you forget how you bookmarked it, or don’t want to, you can use the DK search page in tag mode and type your memorable tag in there to find it again, or visually eye-ball down your <big>Diaries(List)</big> (a.k.a. “posting history” a group or personal posting history looks pretty much the same, e.g., the one illustrated below).
[A.6.] Lather, rinse & repeat at will,
as often as you have more material to test or to store in this diary. I’ve got a handful of diaries I’ve edited/revised literally over a couple hundred times, and so far they’ve never balked yet.
[A.7.] For using as a PRE-PUBLICATION WYSIWYG TEST:
Copypaste into your Nothingish Emptytest repurposed diary whatever material whose what-you-see-isn’t-what-you-get that you want to check for how it will actually appear, once published. Hit PUBLISH/PUBLISH CHANGES and in a moment you’ll see the published diary showing what you pasted in and how it will actually look.
You can fiddle repeatedly with it either here or in the real draft to get it looking more like you want it to —if you’re unsatisfied as to word-wrap, image or color-box location, or whatever— and if you do the modifications here, you can copy them into the real draft once you’re satisfied. Or once you’ve gotten as close to being satisfied as seems possible.
Or you can do the fiddling in the actual draft, and copy it here solely to check on.
Even the title, if that’s what you need checked, such as to see how the wording wraps. Just delete Nothingish Emptytest ,from the title space and copy your draft’s title in. Try to remember to put Nothingish Emptytest back up top once you’re done working with your draft’s actual title. But if you forget, you can always fix that the next time you use your repurposed diary.
🔴<big> CAREFUL to not forget which is the present-day draft you’re testing pieces of before publication, and which is the TEST!</big>
🔴 You might really only need one old diary for both using as a hotlist AND for testing new material, as long as you don’t accidentally blank out all your hotlisted items. You could put’em in the foot of the diary with a big image of some kind just above them as an effective visual separation, like this, so you only use space above the image for doing tests.
(You can find that image by typing “resistors” in the DK image library searchbox.)
🔴 But if you’d prefer two separate repurposed diaries, the further back you page in your posting history/diary-list, the better the chances of finding an old diary you’re comfortable recycling like this.
[B] For How to Recycle Old DRAFTS as HotLists or for Information Storage:
With drafts — the dk system can’t publish a draft that’s a year old (possibly a few months younger) even if you left tags on it, and the system should alert you about that if you accidentally click PUBLISH. So, optimally, the best drafts for repurposing are the ones sitting in yr drafts folder long collecting dust on some topic you’ve lost interest in posting. Still, make sure there are no tags on, just to be on the safe side, so the system will definitey alert you that it can’t be published ... which is perfect!
All drafts are pretty much infinitely re-editable, which makes them great for storing information you don’t want to lose…
Such as LINKS for diaries —your own or other people’s— that you want to not lose track of, or keep readily available for reference, the way hotlists used to do. Or links to articles outside DK, websites, Whatever. You just need to remember to click on the OPEN LINK IN NEW TAB bubble that appears when you hover on a link in a draft, and that’ll get you that item in that new tab.
Or such as information and material itself: I keep various kinds of info in mine, especially material I often need. Some of it is instructions on DK how-to that doesn’t exist in tutorials or at the Knowledge Base, or not easily-to-use there. Most of it is material I often want to copy into diaries or comments: favorite quotations, text dividers, typographic symbols I don’t want to hafta bother to do the whole numeric-pad-how-to to get again, useful emojis. Such as:
Full block █ bullet-block ■ Marker▮ Square ◼ Steelblock ▓
upper 1/2block ▀ lower 1/2block ▄ Halftone ▒
pilcrow/paragraph ¶ section § black rectangle/black bar ▬ degrees ° copyright © heavy asterisk ✱ cents ¢ degree °
beamed eighth notes in music ♫ single eighth note ♪
pole│dblepole ║ Up-point ▲ downpt ▼ rightpt ► left ◄
💖 and of course 🍷 wineglass, beer 🍺
smiling devil 😈 ✏️ pencil bomb 💣 idea/lightbulb 💡
hibiscus 🌺 blossom 🌼 sunflower 🌻 rose 🌹 bouquet 💐 tulip 🌷
There ya go. ;-)