Without really working!

We’ve all had working vacations, and it tends to get worse when you work online. After all, you only need a computer with an Internet connection to check your email, make a blog post, read other blogs, etc. Every library is equipped for this, and there are Internet cafes around, too.

So how do we keep our online business ticking over while we’re having a vacation, without really working?

Computers are great at remembering things, and most blogging software has the ability to schedule posts to appear at some future date. Wordpress is great at this, although there are a couple of problems I’ll mention later.

Before you go on vacation, you can schedule posts ahead so that they appear when you’re gone. You might be completely off line, relaxing on the beach, while your blog continues to make it look like you’re home. It’s the electronic equivalent of your lights turning on and off when you’re away.

True, computers won’t yet answer your email intelligently for you, but at least your web site can continue to be updated.

The problem I mentioned with Wordpress’ scheduling of posts is that it will ping whatever services you have it set to ping when you write the post, not when it appears. Pinging is a good idea, because it lets people know about your post, but if you ping and there’s nothing changed on your blog that’s a bad thing.

Luckily there’s a plugin that fixes this behavior, so that Wordpress pings when your post actually appears, which is what we want. It’s the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, and it’s free.

So the next time you go on vacation, don’t stress about getting to a computer to update your blog, just schedule enough posts ahead of time to cover the vacation. After all, that’s what I did. Right now I’m probably doing some rock climbing on our first family vacation in years.