You might be living in a different time zone than your primary audience. You might have a spark of inspiration in the middle of the night, but you don’t want your posts to crowd together with a big span of “dead air” in between. What can you, as the mindful blogger, do? Thankfully, within WordPress, you can set it so that any given post can go “live” at any given time. This can ensure that your posts are reasonably spread out over the course of the day. If you’ve got your hands on some juicy embargoed information, you can set it so that your highly informative post goes live the moment the embargo is lifted.

How do you do this? Well, when you’re writing (or editing) a post that has not yet gone live, you’ll notice that along the right sidebar, you have a series of pull-down menus that you can adjust. This is where you set the category for the post, customize the post slug, and so on. One of these options is the Post Timestamp. Here, you can set whatever time and date you want, and the post won’t go “live” on your blog until that time. The last thing you do is click on “Publish” (not on “Save”), and everything will take care of itself from there.

I found this feature particularly useful when I went on vacation earlier this month. I was going to be away from internet access for nearly a week, but readers of my blog were none the wiser, because I had pre-written a number of posts that were slowly published over the course of that week. It was like I never left.