What to do on a dry day

Scot over at Meridiancrest has a really interesting post asking what to do on ‘dry days’ - you know the ones - too much on at work or school, too much on in your social life, just don’t feel like it - the days where blogging is a chore instead of fun.

This is an important topic and one I’m sure many bloggers have wrestled with over the lifespan of their blog. In fact it’s something I’ve been wrestling with since I wrote my first blog post (not on the current incarnation of my blog) three years ago.

I started this blog post as a comment on merediancrest but, as with most comments I write it grew too big too quickly and I ended up posting it as a blog entry instead.

The first answer to this question is a question really - do you actually need to post anything on a dry day? Well as you may know from reading Up Your Ego I’ve gone days without a post before - but it does affect numbers - people reading, people commenting etc…

So what do I do on dry days (I get a lot of them).

I used to just leave it (and still do sometimes) but now I do one of a few things:

1) I always have at least three ‘draft’ posts almost finished in Wordpress that I can pull on at any time.

2) Bring back an old post as a sort of ‘blast from the past’ type of thing.

3) Use automated services to pull in content from other places like Twitter or del.icio.us (not so much because they never look very good and I’ve actually just dropped the Twitter service).

4) Post a photo from Flickr with a couple of paragraphs.

5) Post a pause article that normally ends up being a detailed blog post on the meta world of the web.

The most useful of the list above, for me personally is to have a store of ‘draft’ posts that can be called on anytime. Don’t make them time specific though - I currently have four ‘The Importance of Wikipedia’, ‘BBC Pages’, ‘Life+70′ and ‘Mars Bound Elvis’.

That’s it from me - do you have any other things you do when you can’t think of anything to say, or worse - can think of things to say but can’t be bothered to say them?

Is it OK to leave your blog for a few days and not post?

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