Ahead of your time, with wordpress you can!

Many bloggers probably know the feeling of suddenly not being able to stop writing, having so many ideas pop into your mind for which might be good and successful posts that you could just sit in front of your favorite text editor all day long writing up those entries. Unfortunately though for many this remains [...]

Many bloggers probably know the feeling of suddenly not being able to stop writing, having so many ideas pop into your mind for which might be good and successful posts that you could just sit in front of your favorite text editor all day long writing up those entries. Unfortunately though for many this remains just a feeling because what to do with it afterwards? You can’t just throw 20 entries onto your blog at once right?

Well, there is no need to! That’s right, your blog can handle this issue for you by letting you alter the timestamp. In essence the timestamp is nothing more but the date on which your entry will become visible to the public, “but can’t I just submit them manually as well?” I can hear you wonder now. Let’s have a look at some samples to show where timestamping can be valuable to you.

How could it come in handy for you

• Writing articles in series is totally the thing in the blogosphere these days, you see it all around. Daily or weekly entries which follow up each other and cause a lot of bloggers to return to your blog so they can read up on the great new tips you wrote about, but what happens if you’re sick! As horrible as it sounds you might be sitting on the toilet all day long throwing up, having a high fever and feeling absolutely wrecked. Your audience though is awaiting the latest entry and disappointed to find a quiet blog, no new entry.

  Timestamp can help you here, if you write your articles up front you can simply publish it ahead, setting a day or any time of your choice in between the separate entries and you’re safe. No matter what happens to you, your blog will go on!
  

• You are one of those people with quite a busy life, all week long you have to work. Not just one job but a double job so you can keep yourself up in today’s society, your blog is a little source of extra income but you just don’t have the time to write for it on a daily basis. In the weekend though you usually have the Saturday evening completely for yourself, hours of doing nothing except watching television with a laptop on your side. It’s the day on which you usually write your entry but have loads of time left after you finished the first.

  Well, why not write up the rest and timestamp them? Even if you’re gone throughout the week your blog can keep on running as if you’re there still writing up those entries. The blog with frequent content you always wanted to have suddenly is there within reach, lack of time throughout the week simply doesn’t mean you can’t keep your blog running any longer!

• The last but probably most common case scenario for bloggers, you got the time you need but your inspiration simply varies greatly for each day. You have written up quite some articles already and have some in the planning along but you just haven’t come around to publishing them yet.

  A great thing which could help you here again is timestamping, usually you will end up writing other entries and since you don’t want to flood your readers with too many new entries at once the prewritten ones tend to be forgotten. Having them already up for publishing with a timestamp can give you a nice and quick overview of when something will already be coming, stopping you from placing a second entry directly after. Although nothing stops you from writing a new entry to be timestamped a couple of hours afterwards.

Is it hard? Definitely not!

The good thing about timestamp is that it’s something you can easily set, simply change the date to when you want your article to be published and it’s done. On the moment you hit publish wordpress will keep your article for itself till the moment the date you set is reached. Below you can see where in the write post page you can find the Post Timestamp feature, if it’s not expanded yet simply press the plus sign and voila, there you have yourself another great feature showing up and ready to use.

Additional tips on timestamping

Some additional tips of what you could possibly do thanks to timestamp are the following.

• Predict the future, we all have those moments of what would life be like a couple of years from now. Although you probably won’t read it for quite some time and many bloggers don’t even reach a blog of that age it still would be fun to see an entry show up 3 years from now on how you thought your life would be looking like then. If 3 years is too far ahead for you there is also the option to do it over a shorter period of time like a year or 6 months.
• Spread posts throughout the day to make it seam like you’re a fulltime blogger, this gives people more chance to read your entries and in case you are trying to be a pro-blogger yet still have a job to cover your income as well spreading the posts out might just make it appear like bogging is actually you’re fulltime activity.
• Wish your readers the happy holidays, most likely you won’t be sitting and writing to your blog on days like Christmas or the cycling of the year and any other holiday you could think of. For many this results in the entries to wish people a merry Christmas or a happy new year to come either before or after the actual event, with a simple timestamp you could have those entries published on the day itself.

That’s all folks!

I hope you enjoyed reading this article about the usage of timestamping, for those wondering this entry itself was timestamped as well. At the moment of writing as you might have seen in the image has been the 12^th of September, I had some time on my hands and how better to use it than like this right?

If you have any other great tips for what one could possibly do with timestamping or want to share your experiences then by all means do so, let your opinion be known to the world! After all, that’s what blogging is all about right?