2 WP issues (publish and future posts)

Maybe this is a support question – I’m not sure. I have 2 issues that are constant irritants and I thought someone here should know what’s going on.

1. When I publish a post (or save) it takes a few minutes to actually finish publishing/saving. However, while I’m waiting, if I open the blog within 10 seconds, the changes have taken place. Most of the time, I just quit the editor and move on. However, why does the publish/save take so long to re-load the next page?</li?
2. Almost everything I publish is future dated. Sometimes I’l lwrite a series of posts and future date the post up to 1 month away. I know that when I publish a post with links, i get immediate pingbacks. I assume other sites I link to also get pinged. Since the post won’t be avail for a month, it would be nice if I could not ping external sites until the date of publishing.

Anyway – that’s it for me. If anyone has answers to this, let me know. I’m a newbie at WP, but I’ve tried searching for these topics and didn’t find anything out there.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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