It's a fantastic feature of Joomla that you can schedule an article to be shown only during certain times. For example, you might post an announcement of an upcoming meeting on the front page and set it to expire when the meeting starts. You might also want a new post to go online every week, even if you're not around. Either of these is fairly simple. The technique is described on this page: http://docs.joomla.org/Scheduling_an_Article_to_be_available_only_between_certain_dates

One thing that page doesn't mention that is important is setting the "Created Date", which is right above the "Start Publishing" date. Joomla is usually set to sort articles with the newest first, in a blog-style format. It sorts them based on the "Created Date", so when I'm setting an article to be published in the future, I will always set the "Created Date" to be the same as the "Start Publishing". Joomla doesn't mind if you use a date in the future, so this works fine and will make sure everything shows up in the right order.