Three drafts, three mornings

Writing doesn't arrive evenly. You get an evening where three posts want out, then nothing for a week. Publishing them the way they were written means three posts in one night and silence afterwards — which is a worse blog than the same three posts spread across three mornings.

So a site can now say when it usually publishes:

publishing:
  slots:
    - "mon 09:30"
    - "wed 09:30"
    - "fri 09:30"

Or, if you write more than that, a single "daily 09:00".

With that in the config, scheduling a draft offers you the next slot no other scheduled post already occupies. Three drafts written in one evening are offered Monday, Wednesday and Friday, in that order, without you counting days.

It only ever offers

This is the part I care about most, because a queue that takes decisions away from you is a queue you fight.

Typing a date overrides the offer, always. A post you hand-schedule for 14:17 on a Tuesday blocks nobody — it isn't in a slot, so the queue routes around it. And nothing ever moves a post that already has a time. The slots suggest; you decide.

Without the key in your config, the prompt is exactly the one that was there in 1.0.

The offer explains itself

An offer of Sunday, on a site with a Saturday slot, reads like a queue that skips Saturdays. So the offer names the slots it walked past and who is holding them:

next free slot: Sun 09:30
  Sat 09:30 taken by "the-post-that-stays"

A scheduled draft's properties print the whole queue for the same reason. A queue you can't see is a queue you don't trust.

The unglamorous half

Two drafts landing in the same slot would be worse than no queue at all, so the slot search skips anything already claimed — and it does that across a daylight-saving change too, which is where the first version double-booked. Clocks that move an hour twice a year are the reason scheduling code is never as short as it looks.