Editing Published Posts

Published a post and need to make changes? Hot Metal lets you edit any published post and push updates live. The editing workflow preserves your original content and gives you the full power of the AI writing partner to revise.

Finding your published posts

You can access your published posts in two ways:

• Publication home page — Navigate to your publication from the sidebar and you will see your published posts listed there.
• Published Posts page — From your publication’s home page, open the Published Posts page to see a dedicated list of all posts published under that publication. Each post shows its title, author, and when it was published.

Starting an edit

Click the Edit button (pencil icon) on any published post. Hot Metal creates a new writing session pre-loaded with the post’s original content. The Markdown from your original draft is preserved exactly as it was, so you pick up right where you left off.

You are taken directly into the writing workspace, where you can:

• Edit the draft directly in the editor.
• Use the AI chat to revise, expand, or rewrite sections.
• Generate a new featured image if needed.

Publishing your update

When you are ready to push your changes live, click the Publish button to open the Publish modal. Because this is an update to an existing post, you will notice a few differences from the first-time publish flow:

• The modal title shows Update Post instead of “Publish Post.”
• The slug is read-only — you cannot change the URL of an existing post. This ensures your links and SEO remain intact.
• SEO fields are pre-filled — The excerpt, hook, tags, and author fields are populated from the existing published post. You can edit any of them before updating.

Click Update to push the changes live. Your post is updated in place on your publication’s site — the same URL, now with your revised content.

Social sharing on update

You can also share the updated post on LinkedIn and X (Twitter) when you update. The social sections in the Publish modal work the same way as they do for a first-time publish — toggle on the platforms you want, customize the text, and everything goes out together.

Next steps

• Publish to your blog to learn about the full first-time publish flow.
• Share on LinkedIn with AI-optimized formatting.
• Share on X (Twitter) with an AI-crafted tweet.