If you’re running a de-personalized blog like Cash Quests or Gizmodo, people might not even notice that the main blogger has up and disappeared. If you have a reasonably personal blog like Beyond the Rhetoric or the.[ED]ition, however, readers will notice pretty quickly that the primary blogger is nowhere to be found. If readers have come to expect at least one new post from you each and every day, as they do with this blog, it becomes pretty notable if the blog goes un-updated for a day, a week, or longer.

I mentioned this briefly as part of my article on preparing for a vacation as a freelance writer. Some of the steps you have to take as a vacationing freelance writer are similar to those for a blogger who may be away from home for a while. It’s less of an issue when you’re somewhere with readily available Internet access, because you can still throw together a blog post each morning (or just before bed, which I think is the best time to write a blog post). That said, you’re on vacation. You don’t want to have your blog weighing on your mind during that time.

One strategy to counteract this is to make use of the timestamp feature in WordPress, rather than rely on live-blogging. If you’re only going on a 4-day vacation, this means that you need to pre-write and pre-publish about four posts. Not a huge undertaking. When you take a two-week vacation, traveling through Japan and Hong Kong, for example, it’s a bit harder to pre-write 14 posts, in addition to the usual load of a post a day prior to your vacation.

There are two other main strategies that you can try when you’re on vacation or otherwise away from your computer for a period of time:

1. Guest blog: If you’re not around to update your blog, you could provide an opportunity for other bloggers to fill in for you in the meantime. From your point of view, you get free content. From their point of view, they’re able to expose themselves to a new audience. It seems like a win-win situation, right? Big dogs like Shoemoney are known to take this approach.

2. Dead blog: Beyond the Rhetoric is a hobby for me. While it’s nice to make a little money on the side from paid reviews and affiliate income, it is exactly that: a little money. Money is not my primary motivation for Beyond the Rhetoric, so I’m not really obligated to do anything. In this way, I could just leave BTR un-updated while on vacation, but I feel this would be a disservice to the nearly 200 RSS subscribers. It’s also quite difficult to recover a readership after a lengthy hiatus.

Both of these options have some serious negatives, but the biggest problem with guest bloggers is that if you have a personal blog, people come to read your writing and not someone else’s. I know that I ran into considerable resistance when I started writing paid reviews over at John Chow dot Com. They got upset that it wasn’t John’s opinion being expressed. Well, it seems like the John Chow community has come to accept guest bloggers, because guys like BlueFur’s Gary Jones write there on a regular basis now too.

Guest blog or a dead blog? I’d rather not choose either. I’d rathe put a little extra weight on my own shoulders with plenty of time-stamping. Maybe it’s my work ethic or sense of responsibility. What’s your take? What do you do about your blog when you go on vacation?