Journal pacing

"Today" I modified my copy of NitLog to not post entries that are dated in the future. You might have noticed that sometimes I cluster unrelated things into a single post, and sometimes I don't post for several days at a time. Usually this is because I have more than one thing on my mind at any given time, and when I write, I tend to write about it all at once. Then I don't write anything at all for a while (mostly because I don't have time, not because my mind is blank). Furthermore, sometimes I post twice in one day, but NitLog only allows one entry to be "tagged" for each day, so I just date it tomorrow and hope I'm not too inspired tomorrow, etc. That's all fine for me, but what of you, the gentle reader?

Here's my theory. Writers are bursty; readers want their daily fix. NitLog's feature for only allowing one post per day is actually not too bad; after all, if you're writing more than one post a day, you're probably going to overwhelm your readers and they'll start to skim. But I don't average more than one post a day; I simply do it sometimes when I'm bursty.

So I added some simple magic. Now, when I write the 200703/10 entry on March 9, it doesn't appear until March 10. So if I feel particularly prolific on a particular day, I can just enqueue articles and they'll slowly feed out to you at a rate you won't find overwhelming. As a bonus, even when I'm having a dry period, you won't, as long as I keep the queue sufficiently full.

I got the general sense of this idea from Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing, who is reputed to post entries ahead of time and schedule them to appear automagically, one a day, while he's on vacation.