Overview
Writing your thoughts about a subject you like is in the core of blogging. From small blogs before some decades, blogging to-day stands strong and can be found everywhere, covering a multitude of topics from quantum physics and philosophy to fashion and cars.
But one day you will inevitably die.
Should that mean that you stop your favorite blogging?
Of course not! Blogging never stops!
There is a way to keep blogging from beyond death. And it is fairly simple: All you have to do is schedule future posts. However, some details should be kept under control if you wish this post-mortem blogging to happen successfully. This post aims at addressing those details to help you sustain your blog well after your life has ended.
Scheduling posts
First thing is first: The very first thing you should do is schedule future posts. In order to do that, all you have to do is create new posts and set the publishing date in the future. All major blogging platforms support scheduling posts in the future, however with some slight differences.
For example, WordPress allows future posts up until the year 9999.
You can see below some future posts for Harmonia Philosophica.
On the other hand, Blogger allows future posts without the 10,000 AD limit, as you can see below in a snapshot of future posts of the sister-site HarmoniaPhilosophica.eu.
Setting the date well into the future, will allow you to continue blogging even after your body has left this world. Yet, there are some things to keep in mind when doing so.
Scheduling interval
First, try to schedule your posts properly. One post every year is a logical thing to do, yet you will not reach too far into the future. If you schedule your posts les frequently, let's say once every decade, you might reach further into the future yet you will lose the traction with your readers. There is also the possibility to just schedule posts at random intervals, only to have something to publish into the future without worrying too much about details like who will read you and when. And indeed, if you are dead, who cares?
I personally chose the latter method and I have posts spanning from some decades into the future to posts well beyond 3000 AD. (IF WordPress and Blogger will still exist up to then...)
Manage content
A second thing to take into account is the content of your posts. Be aware that posting for current news and affairs is not something you should be doing when posting post-mortem. Any post you schedule for the future should be as void as possible from content that is strongly related to the current era and the current state of affairs. Anyone reading your blog at 2500 AD will not care about the current political news or the current sports news. Try to posts about subjects that will be of interest regardless of when they are read.
For example, you can chose to make philosophical comments that can be of interest in any epoch they are read, or write humoristic posts that may make someone laugh even after 1,000 years.
Administrative Details...
Another important point is the following: Do not forget of any administrative details that could have a devastating effect on the ability of your blog to operate in the future without you being around here to cater for it. For example, any add-ins that you have installed and which need recurrent payments every year to stay active will not operate after you are gone.
I strongly suggest you uninstall anything that does not add much value to your blog anyway. Having a simple site without clutter is the basis for a modern blog. Even if you are not into post-mortem blogging, following this principle is still applicable to your blog. In any case, your readers read you because of your content, not because of any fancy buttons and tools they see in the sidebar of your site.
If you have been paying for a domain that your site uses, it is most probable that in the future this domain will not work since there will be no one paying for it. So try to adjust your internal links (links from posts to other posts or pages within the blog itself) so that they will still work after the domain you use if no longer available.
The end is not the end...
So there you are. You are ready to write posts beyond the grave. But remember: Writing after death does not make you a good writer. You still need to take care and write good posts. Put your soul into them, as you do now.
Do not ever forget that people read you only because you have something to say. Writing without truly loving what you write will only turn you dead, long
