Drip Feeding Wordpress and Random Tags

We will address how to slow drip blog posts in Wordpress™ as well as add random tags from a selection of tags to those posts.

The use of the free blogging software Wordpress (WP) gives a very customizable, clean and easy way to generate websites from collected content.

At least some of your WP blogs should be “slow drip.” By slow drip I mean the blog publishes new posts at ireggular intervals in order to give the blog a more human generated feel.

So lets assume you have your blog posts in some form which can be imported into wordpress. You can check the supported forms by going to /wp-admin/import.php.

Before importing make sure to set your privacy setting in /wp-admin/options-privacy.php to I would like to block search
engines, but allow normal visitors You set this now (and unset it after) so that Wordpress does not ping all the new posts before they have been scheduled.

You can go ahead and import your posts now. After importing there should be a long list of posts shown in Wordpress Admin. These posts will have publishing dates that are most likely not irregularly spaced in the future.

To accomplish the “slow drip” we are going to use the mysql commandline.

Lets assume your wodpress blog has the prefix wp_. Then the table of interest is wp_posts and the important column is wp_posts.post_date.

-- Update post dates to sometime
-- randomly selected in the future
-- starting from now
UPDATE
  wp_posts
 -- Add a random number of minutes to
 -- the current time and store it in
 -- the post_date
 SET
  post_date=
   (date_add(NOW(),
	     -- get a random number of
	     -- minutes from 0 to the
	     -- number of minutes in a
	     -- year
             interval
             floor(rand()*365*24*60)
             minute))
 -- Do not change the date of Already
 -- Published posts
 WHERE
  post_status != 'publish';
 
-- For those who would wish to have a
-- few posts up and ready in the next
-- couple of minutes The following will
-- accomplish that. In this case "few"
-- is set to 5
UPDATE
  wp_posts
 -- Start by adding a random number of
 -- minutes to the current time and
 -- store it in the post_date
 SET
  post_date=
   (date_add(NOW(),
	     -- Get a random number of
	     -- minutes from 0 to the 30
             interval
             floor(rand()*3)
             minute))
 -- But makes sure not to change the
 -- post_date of posts which are already
 -- published.
 WHERE
  post_status != 'publish'
 -- because this is just get the blog
 -- live we limit to 5
 LIMIT 500;
 
-- For those who want to be pedantic you
-- can update the GMT time but i am not
-- sure what its for
UPDATE
 wp_posts
SET
 post_date_gmt=
 -- Add the number of hours ahead GMT is
 -- from the blogs local time zone in
 -- this example it is set to 9
  (date_add(NOW(),
            interval
	    9
	    hour));

I hope this will come in handy for you when you wish to slowdrip your blog.

I have intentionally left out how to add random tags, because i want to see if anyone is actually reading this. Comments will prove to me your existence.