Writing made easy with Writing Helper
We know the hardest part of blogging is actually writing posts. And most blogging software, and even word processors, do little to help writers write. Today at WordPress.com we’re proud to announce a new kind of feature, aimed at helping the writing process, called Writing Helper. It’s a new box that appears underneath the edit box on the Add a Post Screen (the entire box can be dragged to the right side if you want it next to the edit box, instead of underneath).
First up is Copy A Post. You can now reuse the hard work of previous posts as the basis for the next one. Simply hit the Copy A Post button, pick a post, and we copy the title, content, tags and categories for you, saving you steps. If you often have similarly tagged or formatted posts, this will save much time. We will always show your most recent posts in the list, but you can search by title too.
Next is Request Feedback. You can now share a private draft of a post with a friend before it is published. They can help you find typos, suggest improvements and give advice to make the post amazing before you publish it to the world.
When you click on Request Feedback, you can enter email addresses of friends who are willing to help. They’ll receive a special private link to see your draft, where they can leave feedback on your post (see image above). Their feedback will appear in your post’s Request Feedback area when it arrives, so you can make changes to your draft accordingly.
For more about how Writing Helper works, read the support pages for Copy a Post and Request Feedback.
And if you have ideas for other Writing Helper features you’d like to see, leave us a comment.
- April 27, 2011
- Features, New Features
WordPress.com News 
That’s so winning!
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I don’t really like copying posts or tags. Every article should be an individual one, shouldn’t it? 😀
But the feedback feature is pretty cool as I often ask friends to read my article before publishing it.
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Maik: Everyone is different of course, but some bloggers reuse the same tags often, or have 3 or 4 types of posts they do every week, each with it’s own common set of tags or categories. Same is true, we think, for general formatting and layout of posts.
And we appreciate your feedback on the feedback feature 🙂
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That’s awesome! I can also go on record as being one of the many bloggers that will use this helpful feature. WordPress Rocks! 🙂
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Interesant ceea ce ati facut…
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Woo! Thank you WordPress
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Another cool feature from WP 🙂
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Wow! Amazing feature! My friends can now help me write posts!
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The feedback feature is cool (I did this recently, via email), but instead of the Copy a Post thing, I’d rather have post templates. All the formatting, tags, categories saved, but without having to delete/overwrite all the content.
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Copy A Post is basically a simple version of templates. You simply select the sections you are replacing, and start typing to both delete them and inherit the formatting style they had.
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Very cool and handy! I hope the next update will be monkeys that write the post for me!
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re: comment about “men”
why don’t you write about “wild women”
now, that you have subject matter,
which you did not have before, something to copy…
go girl.
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Wow! Everythings going to be better here! It saved me already a lot of time with linking posts. And I loved the contactform, but this feature?
I guess, it is almost the best. I will try it out and look how it works, but I like such stuff, becaus it helps blogging 🙂
Thanks, thanks, thanks 😀
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Pretty awesome feature!
It’s gonna be a Jetpack feature for self-hosted blogs soon, right?
I hope so…
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Hi Harry:
We will of course consider putting this into Jetpack in the future. Thanks.
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I love these new features! Thanks WP!
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This is really useful for updating information on older posts, particularly ones in which technology moved ahead and the old post isn’t up-to-date. Of course, I’m assuming that this doesn’t work for copying other people’s post–copyright is often sacrificed to blog ratings.
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Hi Quinn:
No, you can’t copy other people’s posts through this feature. If we did that, it’d have to be called Steal a Post.
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Hope both features are hitting Jetpack as soon as possible!
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Thank you, thank you, Thank! You!
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thank you for sending this I had no idea I was to get a feed back before publishing now I know 🙂
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looking for someone to read my posts before posting, lol 🙂
thank you for the new options!
Marc
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Looks like a real timesaver – thanks.
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MMmm…. I love new functionality! Keep them commit please!
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Its the smallest of things that make wordpress a better blogging arena. Good job guys.
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I have such a unique spin on life and the struggles I deal with (and helping those like me through it) that I am not sure how it would work for me. Fans would go on my website and say, “what the hell?!” and then run away. The whole attraction of my sight is the unexpected weirdness one comes across. How would I be able to find other people’s posts just as nutty? It wouldn’t be “steal a post” , it would be “oh God, what has our world come to?” 🙂
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Great features! Thanks WordPress.com , i love this!
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Verry cool. I like it
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you know how you often have the problem of remembering a word? as in, you know what it means and you can think of synonyms but you can’t get the exact word? that sort of disturbs my entire thought-process. it would be great if we had a feature to look at the synonyms of a word.
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Amazing feature thank you WordPress team
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Can’t wait to try it! Sounds like a big help. Thanks Team Dudes for working for US!
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Now even I can write half-decent blogs!
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Thanks, this is a tool I’ll be using.
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@Rashmi
Agreed 100%
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Hi, thanks for the tips. The “Request Feedback” feature is going to be really useful!
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For someone new to blogging this is a fantastic feature. I’m a fan!
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These are absolutely amazing features. Since I publish fiction on my blog, I’m sure I’ll use the ‘Request Feedback’ often. It’ll help me centralize the comments of my Beta readers. Thanks!
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Wow! The feature “Copy Post” is a great help for me, because I quote a lot from older posts of mine, specially the URLs. Would be really useful if you could make that window a pull down, so that more than 20 postings can be shown at a time. Can’t be that difficult to accomplish! TIA
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You can search posts by title in the Copy A Post feature, so the 20 that are shown could be filtered based on whatever you want.
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Hey did you just manage to steal a march on me! … check this out. … http://elasticwords.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/stuff-that-future-should-bring-stelg-3-a-ghost-writer/
It’s eerie how some of the thoughts overlap between my post and this new feature!
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This is a very useful feature. I tend for example to use the same categories, as many as 10 or more, for specific posts, and it is a hassle having to check all of them with each new post.
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Perhaps this option should be visible/usable somehow when one browses the posts from the front-end? I.e. via the wordpress bar on top? For example, when one finds a post they like, they can start one just like it with one click from the frond-end.
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This is great! I cannot wait to try it out. Thank you for developing cool yet useful features for us to use!!!
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Hmmm, will this be available in self-hosted installes as well? Just upgrader my install to 3.1.2 (newest release) but cant fint this feature! 😦
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Joachimmg: This feature is currently only available on WordPress.com (as this is the blog for WordPress.com). As you can see in the other comments, we will of course consider this feature for inclusion in a future release of Jetpack.
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This is great because i do a few same type of articles a day this will save time because i find tagging etc very tedious. Especially when my mind is racing to get whats in my head out.
Ok what id like to see is after auto spell some auto correct too. for instance to put capitals in automatically after a fool stop and to put apostrophes in too. and much more. also to auto correct words as we type them, it would just speed things up a bit. plz 🙂
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Mind = blown. This is awesome. Thank you for reminding why I use Word Press and not blogger. Cheers! 🙂
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Amazing feature thank you, This is a very useful feature!
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AWESOME TOOL MASHALLAH WELL DONE WP WELL DONE ^_^
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I wish you wouldn’t leave pages out so often with your tools. This feature would be much more useful to me if it worked with pages. Also, notification of new posts doesn’t work with new pages, either (and making a new post whenever you add a new page really isn’t the way to go).
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I used to use Microsoft Livewriter, because the format was much nicer. But now that seems unavailable, and i cannot even just copy and paste my essays with pictures from Word, as I used to. This happened since the security problem… Thus I have been unable to publish several essays…
PA
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Windows Live Writer is fully supported. Please contact support if you are having issues with it, our happiness engineers will help you out.
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This is special!
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I think these both are great ideas. Since my reviews are often of parts of a series (i.e. Doctor Who, Highlander, etc.), and I try to keep the same format for each one, the “copy a post” feature would come in handy. Also because my review format changes slightly for whether I’m reviewing a book, movie, short story, or TV show, and I often have to go back to check the specific format version I’ve used previously.
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it seems there’s a bug that removes the comments function. it doesn’t matter if I check the comments box or not my draft only comes out with the “comments off”!
please fix it.
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If you still see this problem, please report it to support.
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I loved it to say the least!!
Very well done… yay!!
Also loved how I can upload bigger image in KOI theme!
Thank you 😀
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Sounds like a great innovation, and I will definitely try it!
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This is fantastic. It will really help with tags when I blog a series on a specific topic. Wish I’d had it sooner but better now than never!
Thanks again!
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since i have several recurring themes on my blog, i shall immensely benefit from this update. you guys just never stop impressing me. part of the reason why wordpress.com has such a fantastic community built on it. kudos to you guys for keeping rolling in the features.
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Would like to be able to create and incorporate boiler plate into postings.
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i wonder if this is such a good thing?
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Why wonder? Give it a try. Only way to know for sure.
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This is wonderful! I look forward to the possibilities!
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I don’ t know that this is helpful. What I *do* know is that WP needs to address the screwy wsyiwig/HTML inconsistencies that make posting content a bitter pill.
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Hi Prattle:
Sorry you’re having a screwy experience. You can always turn the visual editor off, which isn’t a perfect solution, but you’re guaranteed predictable behavior there. If you have a more specific complaint, please file a support request and we’ll see what we can do.
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Great feature! As a writing coach, this will be really helpful for my clients and myself! I will also be able to use this in my college and blogging classes!
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It seems no one using IE which returns “undefined undefined undefined undefined…” instead of a list of posts 😉
But this is maybe better – my readers may figure out that they’ll have to read copies every day 😆
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We test on all major browsers, including the full glory that it is IE. If you still see this problem, please report it to support.
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Love this because my writing is below average so I would definitely benefit from the help. I love the idea of creating post from existing information brilliant. Thanks
Ing
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Hi, thanks for the tips. The “Request Feedback” feature is going to be really useful!
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I love all of these changes..
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i like these new feature .thnx for sending this
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I love this!! If only there was a version for my papers in school!!!
Thank you wordpress, you guys are the BEST!
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Ironically yesterday I mention in one of my posts that I am not a professional writer, but do try to write better. The next day WordPress releases the writing helper to help improve blogging which I find funny because its like they knew what I wrote. Somehow I feel special about all of this (^o^) though I never write on the WordPress site itself so will probably rarely ever use this tool. Not sure if the writing helper tool are on other programs since I use Windows Live Writer to post. I do really want to try the feedback option.
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Great idea. I can’t wait for the Jetpack feature to be released!
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I agree with Maik. Indeed each post of my blog is different, so Copy a Post feature will not work for me. However, I might try Feedback.
In any case, it is nice of you to provide us with these new options.Thanks!
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Great job.
Now can you teach my friends to spell, write and edit?
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Dear WordPress: There is such a thing as too many features. http://tiny.cc/lqqv7
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American Elephant: We do make it easy to turn Writing Helper, and most features off. For Writing Helper, or any metabox on the Edit a Post screen, click on the Screen Options link at the top, and uncheck the ones you don’t want.
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That is what is up! I would like to bake a cake for whoever’s idea that was.
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I like Chocolate cake. Frankly I like all cakes as long as they are in front of me and I have a fork in my hand. But many folks contributed to this, so you’ll have to slice the cake so we can all partake.
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This is very useful! Lately most of my blog is reports of my daily writing, and I always have to look at previous “report” posts to make sure that I don’t forget an element or a tag. It’d be nice to have at least the tags already taken care of for those.
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As a novice to blogging, I would add that I am very excited about these additions. I am especially fond of the idea that I will be able to request feedback prior to publishing a blog. Thanks wordpress
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No matter how many times I re-read through a post I often don’t notice a typo. My husband calls it a ‘blind spot’. He says I have the post so firmly in my head that I often read out a missing word and don’t even notice it to be missing.
So the feedback feature will be great for me!! *Off to bed with a smiley face now*
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Awesome, that will help. But it makes me worry about having a ‘cookie-cutter’ post rather than unique and individualistic.
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Some blogs naturally have 3 or 4 types of posts they do often – Copy A Post should make it easier and faster for them to do those standard post types. But of course the feature is optional, and you are free to make each post as unique as a snowflake.
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Fantastic edition, especially since I have a few blog series going on!
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Je ne peux plus poser une post (commentaire) chez mes amis. Pourquoi?
Réponse en français svp. Merci Scott
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This is FANTASTIC. I am one of those that repeats the same type of post, and I was literally just wishing for something like this last week. (I apparently purchased the extra-powerful wishes last time.)
Question – Can you copy unpublished posts? So could I set up a template without the specific data, but the generic html/tags/etc? or does it have to be a published post? Don’t know why I’m asking, I guess I’ll just go try it and see…
And thanks!
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We don’t charge for mind-reading services, but since they are a violation of our privacy policy, please keep it on the down low (shhhh).
Currently you can’t copy unpublished posts. We can see about adding drafts to the list. But currently if you repeat the same post, simply use your favorite one as the “template” to copy.
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Awesome – I’ve been waiting for a peer review feature.
What would be even more useful would be a “reviewers list” that could be kept so that we don’t have to enter email addresses each time.
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Loving the ‘request feedback’ feature!! Next thing you know we’ll be sharing screens and editing each other’s posts in real-time…. Oops- did I just make a suggestion? Maybe too bleeding-edge? Nevermind. Thanks ;)!
K
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Amazing! I saw the boxes show up earlier today (Ironically when I opened a previously pubbed post up to painstakingly copying all the tags and format I had used) and wondered what they were. Request Feedback will also be used by me. The computer I do most of my work at lacks email (long story), and jumping over to the other computer, and pulling all my stuff back up is a pain whenever I want to share my soon-to-be-latest post with someone I’m chatting with or whatever.
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Good, good stuff. Thank you.
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I don’t know if I the copy will be a benefit but the feedback surely will.
Thanks for the innovative ideas!
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Cool beans
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Very interesting, thanks
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I challenge you to count. I bet there are fewer than half as many gadgets on that ridiculously overpacked swiss army knife than there are options, boxes, menus, icons, dropdown menus , sub-menus, tickboxes and other features on the Edit a Post page.
I greatly appreciate WordPress’ efforts to try to make blogging easier, but WordPress is getting perilously close to having so many bells and whistles that it becomes harder to understand and use the interface to begin with. I know my co-blogger is already overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles you already have.
Most people aren’t so tech saavy and Elephants dont need earrings.
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This is a great tool. I hope it’s very useful.
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I would humbly, in the spirit of constructive criticism, suggest that WordPress move some manpower away from developing new features and devote more manpower to addressing problems and flaws in the features, not to mention themes, you already have. The forums are so filled with requests to address flaws that people stop bothering to post them because they know their requests will go unanswered.
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Suggestion noted. We do answer hundreds of support requests and forum question daily, but WordPress.com is very popular despite its weaknesses, which makes it very hard to address every request. But we will definitely keep your feedback in mind.
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How about setting up a directory (call it the Bounce Board?) in the feedback feature where bloggers/interested parties can be available to offer feedback on post drafts? They could be grouped by topics of interest, expertise on specialist subjects or listed as proof-readers only etc. Anyone with a bit of spare time (ha ha) could opt in to the pool of available readers.
Wait a minute, isn’t that what publishing your post is for? Damn…
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Ciaran: Excellent idea. We’ve talked about something similiar on the DailyPost, that we called Blogging buddies. We’d like to build something that makes these kinds of friendships, or exchanges between bloggers possible.
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Been waiting for “copy a post”! YAY!
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