How to Put Your Blog on Auto-Pilot With Scheduled Posts

Posted by Mike Richard on April 15, 2007
Filed under: Blogging, Writing

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Otto Pilot
One of Wordpress’ best, little-known features is the ability to schedule posts to automatically publish to your blog on a future date. This feature is a godsend, particularly for travel bloggers who are keen on publishing fresh content to their blogs on a regular basis but may be away from a computer or reliable internet connection for days or weeks at a time.

I also use scheduled postings to help with writer’s block. My inspiration to blog comes throughout the day - via my RSS subscriptions (i.e. other travel blogs), watching The Travel Channel, or taking a leisurely Sunday drive. But oftentimes, the creativity and will to elaborate those fleeting moments of inspiration into full blog posts strikes me only a couple of days each week. Yesterday, for example, I wrote five posts and scheduled them to publish throughout this coming week.

Wordpress makes scheduling your posts a snap and I’ll show you how. I can’t speak for every blogging platform, although I know Movable Type also offers this feature (see Setting Up Scheduled Post Services for more info on that).

    Step 1:
    First, login to your Wordpress admin panel as usual.

    Step 2:
    From the top navigation, click on “Write”. This will bring up the “Write a New Post” page by default.

    Step 3:
    Write your new post as usual, saving it along the way if you like.

    Finally:
    When you’re done and ready to schedule your post, follow these three steps:
    Wordpress Scheduled Posts

    1. In the right-hand column, change the “Post Status” to Published.
    2. Also in the right-hand column, in the “Post Timestamp” box, check the box marked “Edit timestamp”. Change the time/date to the time and date in the future when you’d like your post to automatically publish to your blog.
    3. Lastly, click the “Save” button (not Publish) to save all of your changes.

That’s all there is to it! Now when you visit your “Dashboard” page in the Wordpress admin panel, you’ll see a box titled “Scheduled Entries” with a listing of all your scheduled postings. Pretty sweet, eh?

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Vagabondish editor Mike Richard lives in Rhode Island - a small patch of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats and speaking in the third person.



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Comments

Dave
April 15th, 2007 - 1:52 pm

Thanks for dedicating a post to this feature. I’d heard about it, however was a bit unsure about using it until you confirmed how it works.

Nice headline, and use of the Airplane inflatable pilot! What a great movie.


ianmack
April 17th, 2007 - 6:38 pm

yeah that top photo is hilarious. too bad it cant’ be included in the photo contest ;-)


Mike
April 17th, 2007 - 7:37 pm

Yeah, I think the graphic is my favorite part. Love that movie!


Nathan Pralle
May 10th, 2007 - 4:57 pm

Excellent stuff! Thanks for putting this here — you were the first stop off from Google and exactly the information I needed, many thanks.