Well, not exactly. But I did actually do something modestly clever yesterday, and I want to either brag about it or document it so I can do it again some day. My blog is, of course, my long-term memory …
So this is all related to the “Unblogged Bits” saga (last updated here). To summarize, the (modified) Digest Post plugin in WP takes my Google Reader shares and posts them here as “Unblogged Bits” posts. As it’s doing it through RSS, it’s limited to the most recent 20. The DP fires off daily (well, twice daily, but more on that below), which means that if I share more than 20 items during the day, some pushed off the back of the truck and are never seen.
And, yes, the laughter in the studio audience indicates that I frequently share more than that.
When last I’d checked in, I’d discovered that I could, through the Crontrol WP plugin, trigger the DP post manually. This was convenient, because I had 5 instances scheduled at 6 p.m. and 5 more at 7 p.m. (and that’s because, I discovered, every time I modify the DP plugin and save it, it inserts another WP Cron job).
(Cron jobs, btw, are timed activities that take place on the blog. WP has its own cron capability now, so that it doesn’t have to tie into the server cron tools. But I digress.)
So I could get around the 20 limitation by manually firing off the DP job through Crontrol, but … well … sometimes I forgot. And, of course, that meant that one post I wanted to be sure that Margie read was lost into the aether. Drats.
It occurred to me the other day that my problem here was that the DP cron job was set up as a “Daily” job (once every 86,400 seconds). I checked out Crontrol again, and found that WP has defined for it Daily, an Hourly, and a Twice Daily interval. Daily and even Twice Daily were too big; Hourly was a bit goofy. But … Crontrol actually defined the TwiceDaily interval … and it would let me create new other new cron intervals. Like, say “FourDaily” (21,600 seconds, or 6 hours).
So I did.
Then I edited the Digest Post code (since it has no control panel front end) and changed the Daily interval to FourDaily. Did you know, by the way, that there’s no English occurance word for something that happens four times? It only goes once, twice, thrice … and that’s it. A shocking gap in our language, if you ask me.)
And, hey presto, it automagically created a new job entry. And, better yet, it has continued to do so.
So now Unblogged Bits posts will automatically be generated four times a day, around 6 a.m./p.m. and Noon/Midnight. I can still do a manual trigger, but it’s a lot less likely that in any quarter-day interval I’ll go over 20.
That having been said, a couple of “Unblogged Bits” issues remain.
First off, the post names. I want them to be unique (eleventy-dozen posts titled “Unblogged Bits” would be confusing), but I really dislike the long date/time stamps. (Annoyingly, the timestamps are +2 hours from the local post time; that’s because it’s based on the time on the server, which is on the East Coast, not the time set for the blog, which is Denver time.) Haven’t figured out an alternative.
Second, what I’d really like to do is have scheduled times for the job to fire — say, 9 a.m. (post early morning GReader browsing), 5 p.m. (wrapping up the day) and 11 p.m. (after an evening grazing the Internet). Since those are intervals of 8, 6, and 10 hours respectively, I can’t just create a “Thrice Daily” cron job. I suppose I could try to get the plugin to fire off three Daily cron jobs at the desired times — but, then, I’d then want to be able to name the blog posts “morning,” “evening” and “night,” and the plugin simply won’t handle that.
(An alternative would be to try and reset the base time and do a Thrice job at 9 a.m., 5 p.m. and 1 a.m. That’s doable, though I still wouldn’t have the desired title control.)
Anyway, that’s were things currently stand. And since the Unblogged Bits are, ironically, an increasingly large portion of the content blogged here, I guess it’s a good thing I’m getting more of a handle on them.