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Enough is Enough…Stop Blaming Wordpress
For over a decade I was responsible for posting financial documents either online or, before the Internet, to a variety of reporting sources. One thing was absolutely clear…post early and it won’t be pretty. Financial documents have associated post times and if the content was to be posted early (or late), it could affect the financial markets (e.g. stock trades, etc.). I can’t even count how many times I had to be up at midnight or later to make sure content went to the correct sources at the precise time. Not once did I enter a client document into any CMS system early because no matter how much we want to be careful, the content was just too sensitive to create a timed post.
It is amazing to read story after story about a blog that has broken an embargo or an agreed-to timed post because of “a problem with the clock in Wordpress.” I am not going to name any names because sadly the list would be pretty long. We’ve seen some bloggers make one mistake and use the “Wordpress” excuse while others have used the same excuse for nearly a week of “early” postings.
So bloggers…come really close to your monitor…I am going to teach you the secret, free of charge to make sure that your timed posts never go live ahead of time.
Most of the larger blogs have multiple team members and people working in multiple time zones. There is absolutely no excuse for pre-posting before the agreed to time, period. Some might say that a story is placed into the content management system so that it can be edited by the team. I say hogwash – use Google Docs or Zoho, etc. to edit the story. This is actually preferred as it’s easier to see the edits by each team member or blog editor.
If you are a single blog author or don’t have a teenager working for you, then stay awake to make the post live manually at the specified time. Unlike the financial documents I noted above, most tech news story embargoes are issued at a reasonable time.
Bottom line – never use CMS timed posts when an agreement is in place. See how simple that is? Remember, trust is earned.
And then ya’all can stop blaming Wordpress.
hallejulah no more blogger bitching
Agreed completely! It is a sad excuse and a lot of these bloggers were previously journalists who are well aware of how important it is to Handle such material. And btw I have been using wordpress for a while now and have been under three embargoes.
Guess what? I didn’t follow this advice BUT I knew how to schedule a post at the appropiate time and wordpress has yet to fail me
it is a poor excuse and these bloggers know well before hand if wordpress is pushing out posts at the right time or not
That’s amazing that someone cannot schedule a post to publish at the correct time, especially one that needs to be handled with great care. It’s not that hard.
What’s sad is that you can’t rely on your CMS, if Wordpress isn’t working get something that does. Timeliness is a critical part of news publishing.
Huh. Never seen this excuse used before…
For the record, WordPress’s scheduled post mechanism works fine. It won’t publish early unless your server has the wrong clock setting. And if that was the case, then the actual clock in WordPress would be wrong *all the time*.
Look on the Settings->General screen to see the current time WordPress thinks it is, and make sure it’s right. This is sorta one of the first things you do when setting up a site.
Sorry, but this still blames Wordpress by making it seem like you can’t trust it with scheduled material. You can – you just need to make sure the time zone settings are correct and that you allow for differences in t he blogs timezone and the embargo’s. Blog is set to central time and the embargo say ‘until 9am Pacific’? Deal with the 2 hour difference when you schedule. Can’t add or subtract numbers? Well, that’s still on the blogger, not the CMS.
Good point about time zones. To add to that… daylight savings time adjustments, make them. I recently had to “select a city” in my WP admin to get my times correct again after the DST changes, but it was easy to do. I’ve never had issues with scheduled posts. :)