Automatic Blogging with WordPress

This is a very simple WordPress tutorial on one of the most most unused features found in your WordPress blog. Okie, I’m assuming here but because it’s not clearly labeled as it is you wouldn’t know what can be done with it. And just to be clear, this is not a software or plugin to do this.

This isn’t a way to take blogging easy but it’s a strategy you can use to manage multiple blogs. For instance, if your blog strategy is to post 1 article per day in your personal blog and web design blog then this can help you. I’m not recommending you to aggregate content as I believe responsible blogging should always be personal and honest.

If you didn’t know, WordPress has a function for you to schedule the publishing of your blog posts. This allows you to write today and publish tomorrow or a week from now. So why would you want to do this?

Remember when I mentioned this should be in your blogging strategy. By pre-writing your blog entries, it allows you to:

• Keep meeting the expectation of your readers
• Commit to your posting schedule
• Organize your time strategically

The part about time management is what most bloggers (including myself) find difficult to do. By automating your blog entry publishing, you can prepare the entry for Tuesday on Monday.

So how do you do this?

After you’re done writing your entry in WordPress, take note of the panel labeled Post Timestamp on the right. Before you click Publish, click on Edit timestamp and adjust the month, date and time you want your blog entry to be posted. Once you’ve set the schedule, click the Publish button.

Although the entry will appear as published in your Post listing, in truth the entry has not been published yet. If the folks at WordPress are reading this, I’d like to recommend coloring the row of entries to be published light yellow.

Things to be wary when using this function are:

• Do NOT click the Publish button before setting the time
  If you clicked on Publish, there is no hope of hiding it anymore. The entry will be public and if you ping any services, it would have rang the bell.
• ALWAYS prepare at least a day in advance
  The Malaysia Chinese parents have an adage which goes, “when pangsai only dig hole”. Basically, it translates don’t wait until you need to do a No.2 before finding a toilet. Or in other words, don’t wait until the last minute before getting things done.

This WordPress feature has helped me to organize my blogging schedule better. It’s help me to commit to both my blog and web design work from Simpleet Solutions. Besides WordPress, I believe MovableType or other blog publishing softwares allow you to do this too so just look out for it.

And here’s how I’ve used it, while you are reading this blog entry I’m actually in One Utama eating a juicy burger at Carl’s Jr right now. :D

Survey of the day: What is the frequency you post a week?

[tags]Wordpress, Blog strategy, Blog secret[/tags]