A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011
Every month I spend two or three evenings working on material for my Daily Chronicles of the American Civil War, which I publish in the form of a blog.
Update July 1, 2011: the current blog is Daily Observations from The Civil War, where multiple letters or diary entries are published that were written on the current date 150 years ago.
Each post is a newspaper article or diary entry from the current day, except that it is from one of the civil war years. Currently, I am publishing from November, 1863, and I’m working on the material for December 1863. The material is published in advance, dated with the date that corresponds with the article or diary entry.
Prepublication, or scheduled release, works well for material like this that has a date already associated with it. It can also work well if one has other pre-existing material that he or she desires to publish over a period of time, or for publishing material during a period when one is going to be away from the blog, such as holiday periods or vacation.
There are three diaries and one news column that will have material in December. John Beauchamp Jones is a rebel war clerk in Richmond Virginia and, of the diarists I’ve include, is the most dependable in that he has something to say almost every day. Horatio Nelson Taft, a Yankee in the Federal Patent Office, made few diary entries in 1863, but he has several for December. Gideon Welles, the Union Secretary of the Navy, had no diary entries for November, but returns in the middle of December. The Situation, a column from the New York Herald, was added in the absence of the material from Welles. I’ll continue including it at least through the end of December.
