Blogging a year in advance: pre-writing posts and publishing them automatically.

March 9, 2011 12:09 PM

Blogging a year in advance: I'd like to pre-write 150 blog posts (Wordpress) and have them posted automatically, one at a time, every Mon., Wed., Fri at 8:30AM Eastern. What is this called, and what tools exist to help?

(What I've come up with in searches seems not quite right. As popular as I'm sure these tools must be, I think I might be missing some keywords; what is this type of thing called?)

I'm working on a blog (not the one in my profile) that will publish, one at a time, a couple hundred large JPEGs (5+mb) displayed in a Zoom.it embed (zoom.it API). Accompanying each post will be: 2-3 paragraphs of commentary, one image thumbnail, one table of bibliographic info, and a link to the full-sized JPEG hosted on my host's servers.

I'd like to write these in advance and have them published automatically, on, say, Mon/Wed/Fri at 8:30AM Eastern. I'd like to prevent public access to both the unpublished images and unpublished posts. (I've assigned each image a pseudorandom, 16-character alphanumeric string, not sure if this helps at all.)

Which software would make this easiest, what terms should I be researching, and what have I not considered? I'd gladly pay/donate a smallish amount for the software, but I don't want to pay out the nose for it.

Specs: Wordpress 3.1 (Theme: Arras); privately hosted (Dreamhost); My OS: Vista; My scripting chops: poor to fair. If you have any other questions, I'd be glad to answer.

posted by jjjjjjjijjjjjjj to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

this feature already exists in wordpress. instead of posting now, you can set a time to post, and then the "post" button will turn into a "schedule" button. but you'd have to manually enter the date and time of each post as you write them, it won't automatically know to schedule the next post on wednesday at 8:30...
posted by sabh at 12:17 PM on March 9, 2011

Most people call this post-dating, and it's been baked into the Wordpress software since the earliest days. Just change the "Publish" date and save the post.

Maybe I'm missing the heart of the question?
posted by ErikaB at 12:18 PM on March 9, 2011

Yep, the ability is already there.

Here's the thing though. You'll probably get messed up somewhere along the way about if you've already set a post for a certain day. So what you'll want to look for is a plugin called Future Calendar.

This plugin sets up a calendar that highlights days that have a post set to publish. This is visible only on the page where you're writing the posts.
posted by theichibun at 12:30 PM on March 9, 2011

It is a standard thing in Wordpress. Just change the date and the time of the posting you have written to the moment that it should appear.

Mind you. Should you use a client to post to WordPress, like Microsoft Live writer, and should the server of your website be in a different time zone than you are, changes are the time eventually set could be different than you planned it.

E.G. my timezone is one hour of GMT in winter, so when I schedule something in WordPress the server adds an hour for some unknown reason. So, if I want something to appear on 0:00 AM, I have to put the time of that post at 23:00 hours on the day before. To make matter simple.
posted by ijsbrand at 12:37 PM on March 9, 2011

I know you specified Wordpress, so I assume you're not interested in Blogger, but just FYI, Blogger lets you do the same thing people have described with Wordpress. By default, a post is set to post "automatically," but you just have to click a button that says "schedule," then enter the desired date and time.
posted by John Cohen at 2:16 PM on March 9, 2011