Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

A few days ago, Raymond wrote
about how he wanted to be able to write a bunch of blog posts, but then
schedule the publishing, so he can space the posts out.  I do the
same thing, as I will sometimes have the time to write a few, but I
don’t want to publish them all at the same time, or sometimes you
want to write an entire series, and then publish one a day.

Raymond suggestion prompted me to write a little window service that
does just this.  You can download it here.  All you need to
do is install the service, set a few application settings in the
.config file, and you can start automating your blog posts.  This
only works with the SimpleBlogService that .Text has, so if your blog
runs on .Text, or any other blogging application that has the same web
services, you can use it.  You also must be using BlogJet,
as this is the only application that the service can read right
now.  I’ll put the source up there too, so people can modify it
for their needs.

All you do is place your completed drafts inside a folder, where the
name of the folder is the date/time that you want your post to be
published, i.e. I could have a post called “post.bjd” inside a folder
named “3–15–2005 5_00 PM” and the post will get published at 5 PM on
March 15.  There is one warning about the names of the folders,
since a colon “:“ is an illegal character for file names, I
replace underscores “_”, with a colon, so this facilitates putting
times into the date, other wise your posts would all get published at
midnight :). 
So do not use an underscore as your date separator, i.e. this is an
illegal folder name “3_15_2005 5_00 PM”, because all the underscores
will get replaced by colons, and it won’t recognize the resulting
string as a date.

UPDATED: Fixed link to download