I have a theory – 80% of the drama started between the major team-run technology blogs is due to the feature in WordPress known as “Schedule Post.”

Y’see, while I love WordPress dearly, one of the least reliable features in the system is the draft / post scheduling system.  I’ve been working on a daily basis for almost three years with scheduling posts, and there has been more foul-ups on a regular basis than I could possibly count up (you ever want to get a scoop on what we’ll be blogging about here at SiliconANGLE? Pay attention to the site around 3-4 AM the day before when I start scheduling posts).

WordPress often arbitrarily posts things in drafts if another post is published after it by the same author – and much of the time when a post is saved and scheduled via XML-RPC mode, it’ll go straight out to the feed.

For us here, where we rarely deal with news scoops or embargos, it’s not a real big deal.  For news blogs, it gives every one of their competitors ammunition to feed to the PR flacks in their rolodex as to why the offender should be taken off the distribution lists for “important news items.”

That’s why it’s altogether quite believable to me to hear that Techcrunch UK is blaming a WordPress error for the accidental publish for the James Whatley story we talked about over the weekend.

although the story was marked as “draft”, and was not in any way intended to be published, it somehow appeared in our public RSS feed. We do not currently know the reason for this and we have our technical guys looking into it. However, we know it was not published manually. Unfortunately the post was also deleted from our system before we had a chance to edit it into the story we did have. Once deleted, it remained on our feed but couldn’t be changed directly by editorial.

Personally, this is a big reason why I do a lot of my editing off-site.  My workflow relies heavily on using Windows Live Writer.  I can save my drafts locally, and only put them up to the site when it is absolutely necessary.