How to solve the "blogging from holiday" dilemma
The problem
You run a blog/site that needs updating on a regular basis, whether that be hourly, daily, every two days, once a week, once a month - if you go on holiday and miss your window for publishing then you risk losing readership.
Common Solutions
There are three common solutions to this problem:
1. Stop writing and tell the audience you're off for a couple of weeks and hope they remember and return.
2. Keep writing from your holiday - not always applicable and almost defies the purpose of a holiday.
3. Pre-write articles before going on your holiday and get a friend post them when you normally would.
; But there is another way...
This is certainly more applicable to those of us who developed our own platform rather than using Wordpress (or similar). What I do on Seopher.com is use a simple unpublished/published system that allows me to have a back-supply of articles for use when inspiration is low. So an extra article every couple of days can be put into the unpublished table in the database - this means that with very little preparation I have a full 14 days of content to be published when I'm away. When going on holiday (or even going away for a day or two) I take a few unpublished articles and schedule them for publishing. Basically, I enter them into the database with a Timestamp in the future because my publishing system only shows content where the time published is in the past. Therefore when the pre-entered time is met, the article appears on the homepage and the RSS feed. This allows me to schedule publishing as far ahead as I wish. Logistically there's nothing to stop me writing 365 articles and having one published at 5pm every day for a year without any intervention.
Why this method is best
This method means that you're totally in control of your own domain, not relying on someone else to publish your material. It allows you to schedule articles as far ahead as MySQL supports (or whatever SQL engine you're using) and it's got to be the most professional way of doing things.
Think of your blog like a business, would you rather use a CMS (content management system) or give a competitor your keys and let them run your business for a couple of weeks. Personally I use the CMS mentality, using a pseudo workflow to control when material goes live. When I'm done building the front end - I'll post a walkthrough of the admin area I use, until then, maybe you should look at modifying your site to allow for this sort of thing?
How can I do this?
That I can't help with, because I built this site and the admin area myself through PHP - I couldn't comment on the intricacies of modifying your Drupal/Joomla install. In Wordpress there's a field called post_date that indicates when you posted the article - you would just need to modify the display functions to only show IF the current date/time is greater than the one assigned to the article. Sort that out and your RSS feed and you're well away - your site can manage time-released content - your readers need never know you were away.
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