I'm Just Sharing

I was reading Keral Patel’s blog on Scheduled Posts In Wordpress Blogs, and I would just send people over there to his blog. However, he seems to have comments turned off, so I figure that I’ll talk about it here, add a thing or two, and we’ll see if this post trackbacks to him. And, if you like it, you can thank both of us, since I obviously enjoy seeing comments from all of you.

Now, why would you want to do this? If you’re anything like me (and if you are, man, I feel sorry for you), you have a lot of ideas and things you’d like to write about all at once, but stop yourself because you don’t want to post a bunch of articles one after the other. Well, by scheduling some of those posts to show up in the future, you can write at your heart’s desire and then space it out so your posts will show up at later times. This can also help if you’re looking to have a post a day but might be going out of town, or might be away from your computer for some days. It doesn’t get in the way of your deciding you want to write a current post either; your WP blog will still release all your timed posts when it’s time to release them. To me, this is a sweet concept.

The first thing you do is go into your WP blog and write a post. Initially, everything goes just as if you were normally writing. Once you finish, and you’ve done all the other stuff that you might do (such as putting in your affiliate ads and updating your All In One SEO, which I do), now it’s time to go up to the right side where it says “Publish Status“. It’s automatically defaulted to “unpublished“, so you’ll want to change that to “published“. Then come down to where it says “publish immediately” and click on the link that says “edit“. When you open it up, you’ll see the time and date is defaulted to the present time and date. At that point, you can change the date and/or time to whatever you want it to be. Once you’ve made that change, hit “save“, and you’re done. To verify it, you can go into your dashboard and you’ll see where it shows you “scheduled posts“.

Now, this comes with a minor caveat. If you’re using a program to inform Twitter when you post new articles, it might not work; my Tweet My Blog doesn’t work if I’m not physically posting at that moment. I do believe that it did ping Technorati, though I’m not really sure because, as I just checked, it’s showing my pinging it within the last 30 minutes, whereas the post actually showed up on its own close to 2 hours ago (oh yeah, I’ve been told that I should be asking people to “fave” me on Technorati, Delicious, et al, so if you think about it,… ). So, I can’t verify that it does any of the stuff it’s supposed to do. Still, having daily posts for your regular visitors is a good thing, because they do show up in everyone’s feed readers.

And if Keral ever opens up his comments, go ahead and thank him also.