Recaps are posts where the blogger summarises posts that have been published throughout a certain time period - usually a week. We’ve all probably seen at least one of these sort of posts. GigaOm’s using it. Engadget used to. Maybe some of you even use them on a regular basis. I know I do.

The question is: Should you? To answer that, we’ll have to look at the pros and cons of recaps.

On the one hand, recaps help your less regular readers catch up - especially on days or weeks where you pump up your publishing schedule. It also helps when you need your super-regular readers to get used to a permanent increase in posting frequency. Take for example GigaOm. The quantity of articles it’s been publishing has increased substantially since it’s transition into a micro-pub through venture capital funding last month. This sort of publishing schedule is certainly set to stay, but in the mean time while regular readers get used to it, recaps are a useful aid.

For search engine or word-of-mouth visitors, recaps help them discover related content. The title-only nature of most recaps allow your “newbies” to quickly find things they want to read while prowling your index page. It also helps them ascertain the sort of things you write on your blog. In quantitative terms, this usually means increased page views.

And since recaps are usually darn easy to write, you can publish them during the lull days - if your blog has any. For those whose blogs have none, lull days are days during the week where traffic drops substantially. For blogs with an office-worker audience, this might be during the weekends. No point writing a deep and insightful post unless your the entirety of your core audience reads it, right?

In fact, recaps also work for what Darren Rowse calls dead patches - times during the day where you creative juices run dry. And they work as well when you need to keep up the posting when on vacation.

On the other hand, recaps don’t usually work unless you have a high enough posting frequency. Imagine writing one article per week, and publishing a monthly recap containing four posts. Not much of a recap, is it?

Moreover, recaps are often a waste of effort when your audience is primarily up to date with your posts - whether through RSS or otherwise. They’ll just skip it. On a related note, search engines might not pay much attention to your recaps either. Besides being chock full of links, they are usually devoid of crawlable content.

So, should you or should you not publish recaps? Well, I think if your posting frequency is high enough - something like 4+ a day - you have nothing to lose from doing so. It’s almost effortless, it helps you tide through lull periods, dead patches or busy times, your regular readers who don’t need it will just ignore it, while those who do need it will love it. Let’s also not forget that it’s yet another post on your running tally. A little cheating to hit that 2000 mark never hurts, eh?

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