Setup An Audit Trail For Your Team Blog

Ever since Blogger gave us the ability to have team blogs, blog owners have been asking

How do I track what my authors are posting?

as if Blogger blogs have an audit trail option. The unfortunate truth is that Blogger is a website publishing platform - it is (or was, at one time) called

Blogger One Button Publishing

Blogger, quite simply, is not a Content Management System.

However, even if Blogger does not provide a packaged audit trail, which would be a standard feature in any CMS, this does not mean that we cannot set one up, with very little work. If you publish a team blog (or a single owner blog), you already have this option.

The display medium, for a Blogger blog audit trail, is quite simple - your email Inbox. Both Comments and Posts, when published, can post to your Inbox. How to generate the audit trail depends upon whether the blog is public, or private.

Any blog, public or private, can provide an audit trail using email from comments (aka "Comment Notification"), and from posts (aka "BlogSend").

A public blog, which publishes a blog feed, can alternately provide an audit trail using FeedBurner email distribution. Formatting options for FeedBurner email distribution are much more flexible.

Whether your audit trail starts from BlogSend / Comment Notification, or FeedBurner email, just setup a few email filters, and store all Blogger audit trail email in a properly named folder. And there's your audit trail.