WordPress offers many wonderful features, including the ability to schedule posts in advance. This allows you to write a post before bed and set it to go live at an opportune time the next morning–the earlier the better–or to schedule your posts for weeks, even months in advance, making it easy to never miss a scheduled post.
It also makes it possible to run posts while you are sick, on a business trip or on an actual vacation. Many bloggers do this to keep fresh content on their blog. Some will specifically arrange guest bloggers so somebody is around to comment.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I will be leaving for the UK this Saturday, and I won’t be back until May 9th. I’m obviously thrilled about the trip–a large percentage of my favourite authors are British, my ancestry is Scottish and English, and I’m going to get to see the historical sites a lot of my favourite movies and books are based on. All that is awesome, but the trip left me with a number of key decisions–what I wanted to accomplish with my writing before I left, what to do with my social media accounts and what to do with my blog.
Scheduling posts is great, but I’ve decided that I don’t want any posts to go live when I won’t be able to respond to comments. Each one of my readers is important to me and I want to develop those relationships. I have no idea how much internet access I’ll have during the time I’m in the UK, and three weeks is a long time to wait for a response to your comment. Leaving my readers waiting that long doesn’t seem right.
My last post before my trip will be this Thursday, and my first post after I get home will be on May 21st.
The only social media profile I will be posting to is my Twitter feed, where I always have a number of eloquent quotes scheduled to go out. If I have a chance to, that is also where I will post any actual trip updates.
What to expect in May
There are a number of things I’m really excited for in May going on here at the Dabbler. Of course I’ll be sharing some highlights and photos from my trip, but I’m also working on a series of posts about screenwriting, an ebook compilation of quotes from many of the authors I’ve interviewed, and hopefully a series of interviews with authors who have successfully crowdfunded their work.
The ebook compilation will be offered freely to anyone who subscribes to my newsletter. I hope to make this a first edition and to add new quotes to it each year, as I plan to continue interviewing authors until I run out of authors to interview–which means I’ll never stop.
I’m hoping to release the ebook at the end of May. I’ve already started working on it, but I already have a few higher priority projects to work on when I get home.
If you want to be the first to know when I’m back to blogging and to receive my as-yet-unnamed ebook compilation comes out, sign up for my newsletter using the form below: