The reason I want to do the feedstats, is to learn that I can do it. I think it would be nice to learn how many people are visiting my feed without having to use FeedBurner. I don’t think it will be that difficult either. Probably take about a week to complete.

The idea is that each hit is registered by WordPress, so it is possible to record the unique IP. Most feeds ping often, so recording each page hit wouldn’t make sense. It would require two tables I believe. One table for the raw statistics and a second table (or could use posts metadata).

There is also the Automattic Stats plugin which should be recording how many accessed the feeds, but for some reason I’m not getting that statistics.

The thoughts and ideas for the Queue plugin are really good. I’m most likely going to use most of them.

The postqueue thing is a good idea – though it’d need an over-ride button as some things need to happen now or not at all.

A nice feature would be ‘Add X minutes’ by default, so that even if publishing immediately there is a small delay (yes, we should ‘preview’ -but I often forget)

Also, a nice option might be "time restrictions". E.g. In the UK I might not want a post to appear before, 2pm, or after 10pm (so posts are new when the bulk of my readers are up, in UK and USA) – a US author might say 7am to 5pm for similar reasons…. or someone might allow 6pm to 6am only, to inhibit posting during their working hours (to ward off accusations of blogging at work!)… or they might only allow posts during a short window of time, so that their readers know that the update will be at 3pm.

So:
Options Settable by plugin
1) No less than X hours between posts (queuing as needed)
2) No more than Y posts per day (queuing as needed)
3) Restrict times when posts appear
4) Minimum delay for futurepost (e.g. any post going live ‘now’ is delayed for X minutes into the future, I’d suggest a default of 10 minutes – this is to protect against the ‘Doh!’ as soon as you hit publish).

Each of these could be enabled/disabled separately in the plugin.

All of these (where enabled by default) would be shown as checkboxes on the edit screen (on the right) , and could be unchecked for a given post – and the time would update straight away to reflect the options for that post.

On the edit screen, there’d be a box that says ‘this post will be published at’.

On ‘publish’, this is copied to the actual publish time as per the usual wordpress place which stores times.

If the user manually set the publishing time, this’d over-ride other considerations.

Once a post has had its publishing time set, a subsequent post would not change it (this’d be important if a later post had its time over-ridden and so were published earlier – it saves database lookups!)

If an unpublished post were edited and re-saved there would have to be consideration to what happens (my inclination is ‘no change’ – but there could be an update button).

Perhaps editing a future-published post with a time already set would display ‘update publish time to XXXX’ button (where XXXX reflects the time if the post were brand new.

It’s a good idea, though, hope these suggestions give you food for thought – there’s a lot to consider!