One of the powerful things that Wordpress can do and Octopress can’t, is deferred posting (or scheduled blogging, whatever). I never really missed it when I was using Wordpress, so I switched to Octopress without hesitation. But now I could use that feature. In case you don’t know, deferred posting allows you to write a post beforehand and schedule its release to some moment in future.

This functionality is kinda trivial if you use dynamic request processing and a database (like wordpress does). But with static sites it’s not at all that easy. So before implementing something myself, I decided to google for other works on this topic. Here’s a good article that I’ve found: Synced and scheduled blogging with Octopress. It also contains some links to other articles.

In short, people write a daemon (or scheduled script) that checks your drafts from time to time. If a draft is due, it is copied to _posts directory and generate/deploy sequence is initiated.

This, obviously, requires a computer that is always on and has actual content for the site. I don’t really like the idea of a daemon, but, I guess, this is a price you pay for using “blog engine for hackers”.

Could this be implemented as an external web service? Is there an opportunity for a profitable startup? :)