Insert time from next available slot for blog post publication time

[Cristiano_Volpi]

Hello! I use Airtable for organizing my blog. Once arthile are ready, Airtable send an email to Wordpress (postie amazing plugin! ) for creating the next post.

I woul dlike to automate the posting time. On my blog, I have 8 time slot per day, monday to Friday, so in total 40 new post per week.

I would like that once I select a checkbox, an automation insert the publication data in the "pubblication Date" field according to the next available slot.

I have tried creating a table with the available calendar (all the available time for the different time of the week) and a stack that increase by one, every time I select the checkbox, but unfortunatly I was not able to proceed further with automation.

Does anybody have any idea on how to solve the problem with an easy and effetive solution (I think to use an automation is the right approach, but my coding capacity are almsot zero..)

Thank you very much in advance to anybody would give me a suggestion on how to solve the problem.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, if I were you I'd try using an Autonumber field and a Formula field to determine which timeslot / when each record / blogpost should be posted, and another Formula field to check whether NOW() is past that timeslot

After that I'd use an automation that would trigger based on that second formula field.  Note that this would not be 100% accurate either as NOW() is updated every couple of hours

Making it 100% accurate is possible I think, but would require another table to be created and more automation runs

[Cristiano_Volpi]

Thank you very much for suggestion, I am tryng to understand your proposal, but I am afraid that will not fit with my workflow, as the Autonumber field give an incremental number once the record is created.

In my case, I have several record, and then I will select the posting, so, I imagine that I have a checkbox field, once the post is ready to be sent to WP, I check the "ready to be post" field. Then the automation will update the posting time based on the next available time slot.

Thank you very much for your help

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

Ah hmm.  It might still work; you'd put the autonumber field inside a table that existed only to calculate the timeslots, and then create a linked field to the table for the blog posts

Then when a blog post is ready, you'd go to the table with the time slots, find the latest time slot record that isn't linked to a blog post, and then link that to the blog post that's ready

(You could also create a system / automation that would find the latest unlinked time slot record and link it automatically for you too)

[Cristiano_Volpi]

Thank you very much for the guidance, I managed it !!!!!! 😀

For the selection process I have made the linking with time slot field happen in a view that filter only the time slot that are not associated with any field, and are in the future, so I am sure that I will not select a slot that have been already assigned to another port, or in the past. Also being the tile slot autonumbered, the list start with the first available in terms of time, and I can select the slot that best suits my need, I woul d say that is quite convenient!