Lost in Seattle

No, no one’s died. ObitBlogging is just the term I came up with to describe my blogging habits of late — pre-writing certain blog entires. The term derives from the practice major media outlets have of pre-writing celebrity obituaries so that, when the famous people die, the papers can run splashy stories without starting from scratch. This sometimes gets them into trouble, however, like when Bob Hope’s death was mistakenly announced by both the AP in 1998 and CNN in 2003 (and there have been others).

There are two reasons I started ObitBlogging:

First, is time. Though my schedule is pretty consistent, my workload is highly variable. I try to write on the bus on my to work, during my lunch break, and/or on the bus home. But sometimes I get so busy at work that I use my bus time to manage email and take care of other things. And sometimes I sit next to one of my chatty bus friends, so no blogging can be done.

Second, is to avoid burn-out — or blog depression. Sometimes, I just want to take a break but there is overwhelming pressure to keep my Major Readers sated. OK, so as page 4 of the Blog Depression pamphlet states: “No one cares…. Stop torturing yourself! You silly bastard!” But I still like to post something every day, and this helps me keep to the schedule.

Movable Type makes matters simple with its “Scheduled” blog posting functionality. I had always noticed that “Scheduled” was an option in addition to “Published” or “Unpublished” on my new blog entires, but when I first tried it, it didn’t seem to work so I set it aside and forgot about it until a few weeks ago.

It turns out (after RTFM) that scheduled posting isn’t supported “out of the box,” but is something you can enable. So, after following the step-by-step instructions, I now have the option to write something when I have time and schedule it to be posted later, when I anticipate I’ll be too busy (or too blog-depressed) to write anything.

One could argue that there are some ethical concerns about this practice given that blog entries are timestamped and have the look-and-feel of a sort of diary. But newspapers do this all the time with feature articles, and even low-level news stories. I intend only to use the scheduling feature for entries that have absolutely no time value, and I won’t try to predict the future or misrepresent the past. For example, I will never write about something that’s going to happen as if it already happened, or write about something that just happened “today” when it actually happened a few weeks ago by the time the post is published.

What do my Major Readers think about this? Given how I intend to use scheduled posts, can I maintain my integrity as a blogger (if there is such a thing)?