Yeah, right! There may be a few bloggers that do that (and perhaps they need to get a life!), but most use technology. One of the great things about WordPress is that posts can be scheduled in advance. In other words, you write them before going on holiday and then input the date on which you want each post to be published. If you click on the date section under ‘Publish’, at the top right of the page, you can change the date and time of publication. Hit ‘OK’ and you will see that the line then reads “Scheduled for…”.

Now, be careful. Since around WordPress 2.8, scheduled posts have often missed their date and/or time. There’s a bug in the package. The safest thing to do is to install a plugin called, appropriately enough, “Missed Schedule”.

So, that takes care of the posts but what about announcing them to the world? Many bloggers Tweet their Twitter followers about new articles. Again, you can schedule these, if you use HootSuite. Write a Tweet in the “Compose Message” box and you will find that at the bottom of the box, reading from left to right, are first the “Shrink” box, (I’ll avoid poor jokes about psychiatrists), to use shorter URLs, then the “attachments” button, and then the “Schedule Message” button.

Don’t go mad and schedule your posts hourly – 3 times a day will be sufficient. And bearing in mind that others will be logging on spasmodically, you can schedule the posts to be Tweeted on several days.

Happy holidays and happy blogging!

This has worked for me, hope it does for you.

1. Download wp-includes/cron.php from your site into an editor
2. Find the line that includes “wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 0.01, ‘blocking’ => false, …”
3. Edit the line to read “wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 20, ‘blocking’ => false, … ”
4. Save the change
5. Upload the file, overwriting the old cron.php file

In WordPress 3.0, reading the file in Dreamweaver, the line in question is 234

There are other ways around the problem; if this does not work for you, let me know.

Update. This worked for me but only spasmodically. I’ve downloaded a plugin called “Missed Schedule” which seems to deal with the problem.