Going on vacation anytime soon? Or perhaps you are just traveling for a few days on business. Even with the best of the mobile tools out there, from smart phones with blogging applications to wifi cards and wireless Internet access on airplane flights these days, you can be stressed about one less thing if you prepare your blog for your time of absence.
There are a few things to consider before you begin to prepare your blog. Does your blog consist of time-sensitive information? Are there other writers on staff? What are the expectations of your readers? Taking a close look at these questions and answering them honestly will largely determine your course of action for prepping your blog to be maintained while you travel.
Auto-Publish Is Your Friend
Write an extra article a day for three days, and you will have three articles that can be set to auto-publish while you are away. If you have time sensitive articles that can only be published after a certain date and time, ensure that these articles are saved as drafts and are not published until the agreed time. Any embargoes you can receive a day or so early can be set to auto-publish in this manner, and you still appear to be on top of the news even if you are away from the computer.
If you are unable to work this out, try a different type of article for your blog. A round up summarizing the week’s highlights in your industry or a Top 10 resource list is not time sensitive and can be posted at any time. Your readers will still receive valuable and relevant information, completely unaware that the article was written days or even weeks ago.
Those bloggers that do not deal with time sensitive information as much will have an easier time stockpiling articles to auto-publish during your time of absence. If you have run out of ideas for advanced articles, look at some of your previous work. Is there anything you can follow up on? What about those articles you started but never finished? Or even those articles you finished but never published? Now may be a good time to polish those articles and utilize them to keep your blog updated while you travel.
Get Some Human Help
If there are other bloggers, editors, administrators or contributors associated with your blog, alert them to your travel plans and ask them to help maintain your blog. Anyone with access to your blog’s dashboard can write, edit and publish content, as well as respond to inquiries and article comments. Other contributors can write something beforehand, and you can set the article to auto-publish at a particular date and time. On the simpler side of things, you may only need someone to visit your blog’s website periodically just to make sure all the things you have set up are running smoothly.
If you plan on blogging during your travel, having a point person with administrative access can help you get content out when you are unable to do so yourself. Perhaps you have taken photos of an event with your mobile phone and posted them to TwitPic, Flickr or Facebook. Your remote point person can take those photos from their respective online destination and include them in a blog post, clearing your schedule to focus on your immediate environment and remain stress free as you are away from home.
Make sure that whoever is helping you out has access to you at (almost) any point in time. Give them your mobile number, and basic travel information, depending on your level of comfort with sharing private data. You may be more comfortable giving them your personal email address as opposed to your hotel address, if you are able to receive email alerts from your mobile phone. Otherwise, rely on services such as Twitter, which can give contacts private access to each other through direct messages without having to share any personal contact information at all.
Remember the Readers
Depending on your level of daily activity on your blog and your readership, your readers will have different expectations for your blog. If you already blog on a daily basis, your regular readers will expect daily content, regardless of your other activities. Whatever the case may be, it is in your best interest to appease your readers whenever possible. It is up to you as to whether or not you would like to disclose your travel plans to your readers, or possibly incorporate your blog into your travels.
If you are able to find a way to maintain your blog while you are away, you do not necessarily need to tell your readers that you will be away for a given period of time. This is ideal for some bloggers, depending on schedules and existing web presence, among other personal factors.
If you are thinking of blogging about your travels, you may want to take a close look at your travel itinerary before committing to updating your blog as you travel. You may not have as much time to blog as you initially thought, so setting up something with a friend or co-blogger can ensure that your content still gets posted if you are able to get the primary aspects of your content to your remote “helper.”
Otherwise, things like photo slide shows and video clips can easily be set up through Flickr and YouTube, which can take less time than writing an article or two. Embed the slide show or video clip on your blog and include a short sentence or two. Now you have updated content as well as a fun and social way to combine work with play.
using xml-rpc, or atom publishing is the best way to update your blog when you are on vacation.
Scheduling post is indeed the best solution for the blogger’s absence. It is actually a habit for me to have an extra post scheduled for emergency back up. You can never tell what may happen so I definitely prepare myself for any untoward events. For scheduled vacation, preparation is really important. Leave things ironed out, not only it’ll avoid such guilt while you are unwinding but also it’ll be very easy to go back and start the business immediately without any hassle.