Making your blog timeless keeps your posts fresh
For the bloggers out there like me who have quite busy lives, blogging every day can be almost impossible. As an example, at the moment, the island I live on in Thailand (Phuket) is celebrating a 10-day vegetarian festival. I’ve been attending the festival early in the morning and late at night, before and after work, almost every day recently because it’s like nothing I have ever seen before. To give you an example, here’s one of my photos from the festival.
What you can see there is a group of men hitting themselves with axes and swords. This past week, I’ve seen men and women slice their own tongues with axes, pierce their cheeks with swords, blades and all manner of objects, bathe in hot oil, run across fire, and climb ladders with bladed rungs. These brutal, self-torturous acts are said to bring luck on the community. I have some horrifically-graphic images I could post, but then I run the risk of losing all my squeamish readers.
This festival has been taking up all of my time, and therefore my blogging schedule has been sporadic. I made the decision then to remove the date from all of my blog posts. I did this because when I visit a blog, if I see there is a gap in between posting, it makes me wonder why. Also, if I see a gap on one of my regular reads, it makes me question the blogger, even though I know that such gaps are inevitable.
Removing the date from all posts means that when a new reader arrives at my blog, the latest post is always “new”. It also makes gaps between posting more difficult to spot. Ideally, I try and blog every day, but this isn’t always possible. Removing the date was as simple as going into the “index” and “single” files of my theme and editing the code.
Now every post reads, “Posted by Angel” with no reference to when my post was written. A lot of bloggers use this technique if they can’t post every day. Let’s face it, what does it matter when a post was written if it contains good content? Not all readers will see that logic though. Readers can be demanding. They want daily posts and they want regularly updated blogs.
Have you ever considered making your blog timeless?
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6 Responses to “Making your blog timeless keeps your posts fresh”
Angel, good idea, but I see you adding the date again in the future when you get back to regular blogging…
I think most of us like to see when a post was posted but for a new reader it doesn’t matter as much.
I’d say enjoy your time off & don’t feel bad about not posting as long as you are enjoying yourself…
How long have you been in Thailand? I spent some time there early this year and was tempted not to come back…can’t wait till my next trip and it will be longer this time.
Well you can see the date in the RSS XML feed
I’ve done the same.
btw. Angel you should update your version of wordpress….
PI, I’ve been her for about 2 1/2 years now. Let me know if you pop over. It’s a great place.
Becky, yes, I should. But I’m really scared to do it. Maybe that’s something to do this weekend.
I don’t think posting daily is a problem really. You only need to find a few hours a week to write the posts in advance, and timestamp them to appear daily.
Well, it’s a problem for me. In between working six days and juggling almost as much freelance work, I don’t have much time to even sleep!
Go with the flow and don’t worry too much about post date. If you can write (and I think you write well) the true reader of your blog won’t go away even if you stop writing for a week. They’ll come back. I’m just one of them.