The check’s in the mail
Of course, there was a time when delivery of many things relied heavily on the US Postal Service and the blame of a delay could be passed along. I saw an article lately about people using technology to do tricks like that, turning back the clock on their computer before answering emails, getting sounds for their cells phones that sound like passing traffic, or a subway, etc. This strikes me as pretty silly. But there are some legitimate reasons, especially when posting to a web page when you might want to go ahead and type something and have it show up at another time, or as having come out earlier.
I’m writing this post at 2PM EDT on Friday, July 22, 2005. If I set things correct, it should be published around 11 AM Eastern on July 27th. That’s accomplished with the WordPress software that I’m using to maintain the site now. Most blogging or CMS tools give you options to specify when something is published. I’ve used this a couple times to “post date” an article. In moving things over from the old site, there were a few posts from 2003, so I wanted to maintain their proper point in time and set the date stamp to match.
I’ve started writing a series of articles here and on the North Carolina Genealogy site. That are scheduled to be published one a day for several days. (In some cases I’ve got 2 or as many as 4 or 5 articles queued for a specific day and time.)
My main reason for this is, I happened to have time to work on a number of posts right now, but I don’t want to dump them ALL out at once. Why? Well, there’s another feature of WordPress which sends a notification to a few sites when an article is posted. I think it would be more effective to have 2 or 3 notices a day sent out, than it would to have 12 sent out in one day, then nothing for a period. Another reason is the viewers, right now there aren’t too many, but…. dumping a lot of articles and then nothing might be frustrating. (Did he drop off the face of the earth?)
The next reason is the search engines. I’ve noticed LOTS of spidering of the pages over the last few days and slowing the pace of posting might help the specific article links get a bit more attention.
Of course, I’m sure you might think of other reasons. “Product announcement needs to go out on xxx date” Either to make sure you don’t forget, or to make sure it doesn’t get published earlier. I can see also some folks using it to make sure that their articles get posted while they’re on vacation or while they’re busy otherwise. It’s definitely a feature to look for in your CMS tool or Blogging software.