The Real Ryan J. Parker

When I started this blog a couple of weeks ago my first goal was to begin building a readership base. This is obviously the key to a blog’s success, so this goal shouldn’t surprise any of you.

To help accomplish this goal I wanted to, at a minimum, make one quality post per day that will be relevant to most people interested in web development, internet marketing, Wordpress, and the like.

Thankfully it didn’t take me long to discover a Wordpress posting feature I’ve been missing out on since I first started using the software in December of 2005: Post Timestamp.

How I missed out on this feature for so long is beyond me, so I figure this post is likely relevant to a lot of people out there, even if you’ve been using Wordpress for an extended period of time.

By using this feature you can set a post to be published at some date in the future, and I’ve been using this feature to help me keep to my goal of one quality post per day.

Using this feature is simple: under the Post Timestamp menu in the Wordpress post options click the Edit timestamp checkbox and set the date and time to some time in the future. Once you’re finished with your post click Publish like normal, but instead of your post appearing automatically it’ll be published at the date and time you entered.

The greatest part about this feature is that your post will be published regardless of what you may be doing at the time. In my case the posts are published while I sleep. I figure that by getting each post out early in the morning it’s likely to be seen by more people during the day, so what better time to have the post publish then while I’m asleep? (OK, I’ll admit it: I think it’s very cool that I can sleep and update my blog at the same time.) This helps me keep posts coming out on a consistent basis, and posting consistency is something all blogs can reap benefits from.

You can probably think of a million ways in which you can use this feature to update your blog while you’re doing something else, and a few things quickly come to mind: you’re on vacation or you keep a small collection of posts available for publishing in the event you don’t have anything to write for the day, or you simply want to space out your posts so you don’t bombard your readers with a flurry of posts.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I did publishing it while I’m getting some much needed rest.

Tags: wordpress, edit timestamp, blog consistency