Please Add a Relevant Publish Time to Blog Posts

I've found, through my years of blogging, that I don't like writing to a schedule. I don't like planning what blogs I'm going to write in a given week, nor do I like writing them, and then saving them to be published the next day.

I guess some of it is because I enjoy the immediacy of being able to see my site's analytics showing any new hits to the post, as well as not personally finding there to be much point sitting on a post.

Often the posts I'm writing are a chance to document a thing, or are a way to get my thoughts across. Whether I spend ~5-10 minutes, or the best part of a week painstakingly preparing my thoughts in written form, I don't want to wait longer to get them out.

I doubled down on this with a follow-up to National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) where I blogged every day through November, not enjoying being "forced" to blog every day.

Something I did early on with my posts up until mid 2019 was having the publish date as midnight of the day that I posted the post, rather than the minute that I actually published it. It's something I saw others doing, and something I still see quite a few folks doing.

I urge people to not set their publish date as midnight for a few reasons:

• if I'm scrolling through my feed reader in an afternoon and I've already been reading things today, I'll potentially miss the post, as I may not scroll back as far as the previous day
• if you're publishing multiple posts in a day, it'll make it clearer the order they were published in
• it removes the information for you, too, as to when it was published - i.e. "was this a just-before-bed post", or "taking a long lunch break"

As an aside, I realised that I'd not actually pushed the commit with this article live, so although it was finished this afternoon, it's not technically been published until this evening. I decided to keep the publish date accordingly, instead of updating it.