Blog? Our Computers Will Do That for Us

Today was a blogging experiment, partly successful. How could I get a nice stream of posts going without being in proximity to my computer all day? I knew I could schedule blog posts, but could I automate everything else? Yes, but.

First, I want to apologize to anyone who clicked on a Twitter or Facebook link only to find no blog post. I was not fucking with you; I messed up. The interface for scheduling a post in Blogger is fairly simple; you set a date and time and you’re (not) done. I assumed that once you set a time, you’re set, and if you hit the “publish” button, it would override that and publish immediately.

I then figured out how to schedule tweets (and found out where Twitter makes its money). Where do those “promoted tweets” that keep showing up on my newsfeed come from? Now I know. There’s a Twitter page that lets you not only schedule a tweet, but promote it as well. I’d like to develop a base of readers in a more organic way without any expense (so recommend my blog to all of your friends). Share it on Facebook. Whatever.

The Twitter interface was simple, and I was able to quickly schedule a post. Unfortunately, since I messed up on the Blogger end, everything went out without actually publishing any posts. This was counter-productive (and I have the read stats to prove it). Maybe yesterday’s posts will have a long tail. I can only hope.

It turns out that in the Blogger interface, after you schedule a post, you need to hit the publish button. This moves that status of the post from “draft” to “scheduled.” There was an additional problem with Blogger that some posts were scheduled for Monday. Once I hit "publish," they posted immediately, although I went through the effort of getting them to the right day first, just in case.

My apologies again for anyone who was frustrated trying to read posts yesterday. They’re all up now, if you want to try again. And apologies for the “insider baseball” aspect of this post. I’m trying to avoid blogging about blogging because it’s fucking tiresome so insider (yeah, that too). Bear with me while I work out the technical aspects of this blog. And get your friends to read it.