Custom briefs
Writing the instruction yourself when you know exactly what the article should be, without adding a Topic first.
On this page
A custom brief is the route for an article you already have in your head. It skips Topic approval and goes straight to a drafting run against your own instruction.
When to use one
- A launch post, an announcement, or anything tied to a date.
- An article a customer asked for, in the words they asked for it in.
- A piece that does not belong in any existing Direction.
What to put in it
The more specific the brief, the less generic the draft. Worth including: who it is for, what it should argue, which product capabilities it should mention, and anything it must not claim.
Adding resource links
A brief can carry its own reading list. Paste complete https:// links into the
brief and Blogged detects them automatically, then shows a checkbox list titled
Optional resource links below the box. Detection is the whole of what
happens while you type: nothing is fetched yet.
You decide which of the detected links become candidate resources for the run. Use all valid links ticks every link that passed validation, and Clear empties the selection.
A link that cannot be used is listed with the reason rather than quietly dropped, so you can fix it and paste it again.
| Why a link is unselectable | Reason shown |
|---|---|
| It is not HTTPS | HTTPS is required. |
| It carries credentials in the link | Remove credentials from the link. |
| The host is an IP address | IP address links are not accepted. |
| The hostname is incomplete or not a public one | Use a public link with a complete hostname. |
| It carries sensitive query parameters, such as a token, key or session id | Remove sensitive query parameters before selecting this link. |
You can select at most 10 links. That ceiling is enforced twice, in the browser
as MAX_SELECTED_CUSTOM_BRIEF_RESOURCE_LINKS and again on the server as
MAX_CUSTOM_BRIEF_RESOURCE_URLS, so a request that reaches the API by some
other route is held to the same limit.
What the worker does with them
Selected links are fetched only after you generate, by the worker, and never while you are still writing. Every axis of that fetch is bounded:
- Concurrency3 resources at a time
Ten links do not open ten connections to ten sites.
- Timeout15 seconds total
A total budget for a batch, not a per-link allowance. A slow host cannot hold the run open.
- HTML downloaded1.5 MB per resource
Anything past the cap is not read.
- Text readabout 8,000 characters
Taken from the parsed main text, so a long page contributes its article rather than its navigation.
- Facts extractedat most 12 per resource
A resource contributes a bounded set of atomic facts, not a summary of itself.
A link whose robots policy disallows fetching is skipped, recorded as
robots_disallowed. A link that fails to fetch for any other reason contributes
nothing and does not fail the run: the article is written from what was
gathered. Only verified facts extracted from a resource can inform the article,
so a page that was reached but yielded nothing usable ends up in the same place
as one that was never reachable.
What still applies
A custom brief does not bypass the rest of the pipeline:
- The draft is written against your Knowledge Engine, so claims stay tied to sources. Facts extracted from resource links join that same evidence rather than going around it.
- Internal links are proposed only against destinations that exist.
- The post lands with author mode
Assisted, because the pipeline wrote it. The brief was yours; the article was generated. - The run counts against the Project's post allowance: the billing period's on a paid plan, the one-time lifetime grant on a Free Project.
Retrying
If a run fails, retrying reuses the request you submitted rather than asking you to type it again. That includes the resource links you selected, which are re-checked against the brief so a link you have since edited out is dropped rather than silently carried forward.