Did you ever wonder how Problogger.net and other famous bloggers keep publishing posts daily? Some days even several times a day. How come their blog machine is so well oiled? Are they online all the time? Every day? Or do they have assistants working for them publishing their posts?
The answer is WordPress TimeStamp. WordPress has this great built in feature that allows you to schedule your blog posts to be published in the future. You can write your blog post today and set it to be published automatically at any time you wish.
I use it and it definitely improves my blogging productivity. It saves me a lot of time when it comes to blog posting. It helps spread my blog posts over a few days and helps me keep a constant flow of new blog articles being published.
You can use TimeStamp feature to schedule blog posts to be published while you are away on holidays. It is a great way of ensuring that your blog does not become inactive while you are away.
Or you could simply write all your posts at the beginning of the week and schedule them throughout the week to be published automatically. Then you can take some time away from blog post writing and focus on research and promotion.
If you have inspiration on topics to write about it is a good idea to maintain a backlog of several blog posts in the WordPress timestamp. This way you know you have posts coming up and it will make you less stressful. You will have time to concentrate on researching, marketing or finding good topics for future posts.
How to use WordPress TimeStamp
Write your post as you would normally. Take a look at “Publish” section in the right side of your post. Where it says “Publish immediately” click on edit. Now you will have the option to select a date and time you want your post to be published. Select the date and time and click on OK.
When you have confirmed the date you want your post to be published, the “Publish” button will become “Schedule” button. You will also have a “Scheduled for” date and time.
If you push the “Schedule” button your post will be automatically published at the chosen date and time.
Hopefully this quick tip is useful to you. Please subscribe to my RSS news feed as I will have some more blogging tips in the future.
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{ 23 comments }
This is a great tool. If I’m not mistaken, they just implemented this feature in one of the latest updates. Regardless, it’s a useful feature that I’ve already used in my blog a few times.
I like the idea of writing a bunch of articles at the beginning of the week, then scheduling them throughout the rest of the week. As Ron Popeil would say, “Just set it and forget it!”
@Chris – thanks for the comment. I like the quote, fits with TimeStamp perfectly.
This is a great feature, thanks for writing about it. I’m going to have to start implementing that right away. That will help a lot because my free time is typically in chunks, not a consistent daily amount, so this way I can do the whole weeks posts like you suggest in one large block of time, as opposed to a couple hours a day. I always wondered how Darren did that.
This is one of my favourite features in wordpress. I can often write 5 or 6 blog posts and just schedule them to post at later dates.
This sounds like a good tool I wasn’t aware of this. I’m going to try to use this. thanks for the info! This will definitely help me out.
For some reason my timestamp feature doesn’t work and I’ve searched online how to fix it. I wish I could get it fixed soon so I don’t have to publish manually.
The timestamp feature is a godsend for sure. I was publishing my posts in the morning and you just set it and forget it. Now I have to set it and remember to publish
Thanks for all the comments!
@Rowell Dionicio – Strange. Did you try to upgrade to WordPress 2.7?
@Mike – Definitely. Comment moderation is the first thing on my schedule.. Even before checking emails. I believe by approving / commenting to comments as soon as possible, we encourage more comments / responses,.
I have been using this in blogger.
This is certainly a powerful tool, but I would add that those who use it should still check their blog periodically even if they have pre-scheduled a large number of posts. That way comment moderation can be kept up, preventing the blog from getting a static air to it
This saves my life on my other blog (http://www.unwrules.com/) because I write about 3-4 posts on it a day and save them for later publishing. Don’t know what I’d do without it!
@Marko I am using WP 2.7. It’s the upgrade that somehow messed it up. I’ll just have to wait for 2.7.1 for a fix.
Hi Marko,
Its indeed a great tool and seems to have been added with the latest set of updates. Honestly it will save time if you write couple of post in the start of the week and then schedule it. Thanks for sharing it.
Cheers
Krish
Yes, I like this feature and use it quite often.
The only problem that I find when creating posts in advance is that I have to strongly resist the urge to publish them all at once.
No doubt that time stamp is a really cool feature.
However this doesn’t exactly explain how some blog are able to publish daily articles. In other words it will come in handy if you write 10 articles and schedule the to each post daily but it will not create the time needed to write the 10 posts.
@Gerald Weber – Yeah, we still need to write the posts. You never know but next WP version might be writing posts automatically hehe
@Shirley – I know what you mean, but have learned to take it easy with the publish button recently.
I’ve actually used this before, and it is so helpful. You can take one full day to write a full week’s worth of posts, and spend the rest of the week on promoting them. The only problem I’ve had is the fact that sometimes during the week something big comes up in the news and I have to write about it and post it immediatly. That being said, all I have to do is reset the schedule for one of my other posts.
The ability to schedule posts was available in previous WP versions, but 2.7 has made it much more accessible.
I have a Boston based music blog and I do daily show listings. I’m on a mac but I find doing the show listings in Windows Live Writer is much more efficient so I use VMware. With WP2.6 I would be hesitant to schedule posts within Windows because it was unreliable, but now I do it without hesitation. Recently, I’ve been doing a week of show listings in a sitting, which is great!
Cheers,
Aaron
Enough Cowbell
I never once scheduled my entries but this sounds really productive and I’m definitely gonna make full use of it. thanks for the great article!
I have a problem with the Post Timestamp utlity. Once used to a post the Time is staying the same even when you make changes on the post. On other post where the timestamp was not used the day and time of the post are changed on every save. This appear also in the Sitemap. I think this is important and I am wondering how to change the date on the post with timestamp originaly.
does anyone know how to reset the date so that it says publish immediately again? for some reason some of my posts got auto scheduled without me doing it – i need to covert them back
thanks for your help!
@sdk – Hmm not sure now without having a look at it, but why not just set it to be published one minute from now… almost like publish immediately. A quick fix.
Or try the “Status: Scheduled” and click on Edit and see what you can do there.
thx for your quick reply Marko…
the thing is, there is no “scheduled” in the status drop down menu, just “draft” and “pending review”
important to note that all of these drafts are scheduled in the past – there are only two people whom edit this blog and i’m the only admin who would mess with that part of it (the other is just an author) – and i know i didn’t schedule these posts – there are older posts that weren’t scheduled in case you were wondering if all of them were at some point
i’m wondering if a plugin could have done it?
regardless, my boss is frustrated as she doesn’t want to have to change the date every time she wants to publish an old draft…
Thank you very much for writing this. When looking for information on back-dating, I only found old posts by WordPress itself and they were just not clear enough. Thank you, also, for using a graphic.
Much appreciation,
Nichole