The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFahterhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

I wrote this entry five days ago!

If you've been working with a webmaster or company that manages your Web site, the comment that I wrote this entry five days before it appeared on the site isn't news. In fact, probably everything you do on your site has that sort of time lag, even if you don't want it to occur.

Wresting control of your site back into your own hands is a big win, obviously, so it can track exactly what's going on with your business or, as the case may be, in your life. But that has its own problem: if you know you're going to be out of the office but need something to show up on your site, how do you do it?

That's yet another reason why a weblog makes such a splendid content management tool. Given that best practices with blogging are to have at least two entries per week, a lot of people instantly conclude that they have to spend two days each week writing, but that's not true at all.

In fact, I'm writing this a week in advance to make just that point.

I'm writing this entry on April 7th and it will stay in a to-be-pubilshed queue in Movable Type (my blogging tool of choice) until the 11th of April, when it'll just magically appear. Specifically, it's scheduled to be published at 2006-04-11 13:50:32, just in case you're a stickler for details.

But you can do more than that, because you can schedule postings with a high level of granularity so your site can continue to be adding new material, "fresh content" as I like to talk about, without you being within fifty miles of a computer terminal.

On my other weblog, Ask Dave Taylor, I sometimes schedule things out for when I know I won't have time to get to the site and compose new Q&A material. I also sometimes publish content in other magazines or on other sites with a republication agreement that gives them a 30 day exclusive. Do I mark my calendar? No, of course not. I immediately also post it to my weblog, but schedule it for 30 days in the future.

How far will I take this? Well, since I think it's one of the core features of a weblog pretty darn far. Check this out:

Here you can see that the bottom couple of entries have been posted in the last day or so (they have a little green circle that shows they're "live" on the site) while the ones queued up for future publication are just sitting and eagerly waiting for the proper time to roll around.

(of course, by the time you read this, most of them will have gone active on the Ask Dave Taylor site, but that's a good thing! In fact, pop over there and check out the entries and marvel how you cannot tell that they were written days in advance).

Compare this capability to how you currently manage your own Web site. I bet your solution is more awkward if not downright impossible.

It's yet another reason to consider using a blogging tool as the foundation of your Web site. Even if you don't think of yourself as a blogger, there's no reason not to leverage the power of blogs to help manage your Web site.

And as for me, well, pretend I just pushed the "publish" button instead of the "schedule" button five days ago.

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