How do I schedule a blog post in the future?

You're right that one of the very best features of using a weblog as a content management tool is that you can stick to a specific publication schedule without having to actually publish on each of those days. It's a big win. In fact, this very posting was written on Monday, but not published until Wednesday morning. Nice and easy.

But how do you do it?

There are two steps to it, once you've written your blog entry and are ready to publish it.

Once it is ready, setting a blog publication time in the future is an easy two-step process.

First step is to scroll to the bottom and set the Status to "Scheduled":

Now the tricky part -- partially because MT 3.3 is an older version of the blog tool -- is to set a time and date in the future. In this version, there's no fancy pop-up calendar, no easy mechanism for adjusting the time, just a text box that you change with the date and time you desire:

You can see here that I set the publish date of this blog entry to May 28, 2008 at 8:55:22am. Generally, if you go back and look at the publication dates on this weblog, you'll see I try to stick to a daily schedule, and the time is always somewhere between 8am and 9am: I simply take the time that's autofilled when I click "New Entry" and change the hour to match. That way the minute and second are both fairly random.

Nice trick, eh? Actually, it's darn useful!