Easton from BusinessBlogwire posted some time ago about 5 Reasons to Preschedule Your Posts (and 5 Reasons Not to).
Its a short and interesting read. Some blogging engines like WordPress allow you to “Future Post”, so on a good day where you have 10 hours of free time, you can write 10 posts and set them to be released by the day. This is done simply by changing the post timestamp before you publish. I used to use future postings on my trekking blog previously, and it is really pretty useful good.
Future Pings
However, one point to note about future posts (for WordPress) is that the pings are not sent out when the posts are time to be published. According to the WordPress docs, the trackbacks are sent whenever a post is edited or published. This means when you are drafting out your future posts, you will essentially be sending one ping each for each future post, but the feeds will not show any updates.
So how do you resolve that problem?
There is a WordPress plugin at Skippy.net called WP-Cron, that suppresses the default pingbacks when you click publish, and then periodically checks back to see if any of the future posts are visible, and sends out the trackbacks! Nice once!
Unfortunately though, the last update of the plug-in (version 1.4) was back in October 2005, and according to one of the comments, it is not been evaluated yet if the plug-ins work with WordPress 2.0 and above.
I’ve been searching for a similar plug-in that is tested and supported the recent versions of WordPress, but to no avail. Anyone has any suggestions?
Suggest you check out http://www.daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html
I have been using this plugin and it seems to work okay with version 2 of WP.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Kevin.
Hey Kevin! Thanks for your suggestion! I’ve been to the Devan.se website… the functionality of the plugin doesn’t seem to be the same as WP-Cron.
The Smart Update Pinger overrides the default pings and pings only if the post has not been previously published. This prevents ping spamming.
What I am looking for is one that automatically checks if you have any future posts and sends out the pings. Does the Smart Update Pinger do that too?
Thanks for the mention and good thoughts, Kian. Wish I knew more about WordPress – I didn’t know about the problem you’re describing. Sounds like that plug-in should help.
Know More Media uses Movable Type, which to my knowledge doesn’t cause the same pinging trouble as WordPress apparently does when pre-scheduling posts.
One little traffic tip to all bloggers: Space out your publishing times by at least an hour or so, to make sure the blog search engines don’t ignore some of your pings due to spam filtering.
That’s a wonderful tip Easton! I think we have much to learn from your experience! Thanks!