Future Posts

Here’s a thought to help out with blogging discipline. I’ve been trying to post here at least twice a week: Fridays with the “On the Radar” linkdump series, and Mondays with a more personal “Weekend Update” series. Anything that gets written in between is bonus material. This has been helpful in two ways. One, it helps with getting those links _out the door_. I have had “a bad habit”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/06/11/links-that-came-in-handy/ in the past to store up dozens of links and have them sit in a stale blog draft, only to cost me hours of reparsing them to put them online. Two, it helps me write more personal stuff that, I dunno, my mom might be interested in reading.

I think it’s been a successful experiment so far: blog postings are up to eight per month rather than one per month, and I think people are sticking around because of it. However, the time commitment, at least for the On the Radar blogs, is still a bit costly. My process for collecting links goes something like this:

# *Early in the week:* set up a draft On the Radar blog entry
# *Throughout the week:* find an interesting link, cut ‘n’ paste it into the draft (maybe with formatting and comments, maybe not)
# *Friday:* add in all the commentary and formatting I didn’t do through the week, name the entry and post it

That last step can take a good couple hours, depending on how lax I was through the week. The other day, though, I stumbled over a feature in WordPress that might help. I was messing around with the datestamp of a blog entry on the Everything Newark blog and rediscovered the “future posting” feature. From the “WordPress codex”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts.

All posts dated in the future will not appear on the site until that time has passed. If you wish to write posts that will automatically appear on your schedule, set the date and time here.

I’d forgotten that setting a future timestamp will actually keep that blog out of view until that time passes. It occurred to me that, when I start a new On the Radar entry, I could just set the datestamp for Friday and Publish so, regardless of how finished or unfinished it is, that blog will be posted on this site on that date. It’s really more of a positive reinforcement than anything: when I realize that a blog entry will show up automatically on the site on Friday, I might be more prone to be more thorough with Step 2 and save myself a bit of time at the end of the week.

I just set the datestamp for this week’s entry for Friday. Let’s see how this goes. While we’re on the subject — what do you think of the format? Are you digging it? Sick of links? What do you do to keep you blog fresh?