March 16th, 2010
We did some tweaks and fixes to the website to improve its speed and usability. The most noticeable is the new homepage for logged in users. It now lists the account details and the latest news instead of the account types. Plus users now get redirected to the homepage when they log in and not the jobs page. And a link to the upgrade page was added to the menu in case you want to check it out
Please let us know what you think.
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February 12th, 2010
The move has been completed and we’re back up, 100%. Downtime was minimized (approximately 10 min total) and all cron jobs have been transferred.
I’ve worked with a few people to deal with some minor bugs, but everything seems to be in place. Please let me know if you find anything out of sorts.
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January 30th, 2010
Cronless will be moving to a new VPS server shortly.
There has been difficulty with the reliability of mail and the DNS being blacklisted because this particular host seems to have some other less-than-desirable sites hosted there.
I will make the move in such a way that the jobs will be transferred, the site will be in “maintenance mode” preventing job changes for no more than 48 hours while the DNS change takes place.
Thanks for your patience.
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December 31st, 2009
We hope you and your families have a prosperous, wonderful, safe and healthy New Year.
Thanks to everyone for all your support in 2009. We’re looking forward to a great 2010 with you and all the new folks who sign up for free cron jobs.
If you like our service, tell your friends to run their PHP cron jobs here too!
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December 22nd, 2009
Here are the best tips compiled into a single list for your convenience. Consider it the “Best of Cronless, 2009″.
Tip 1: When you save your cron job, Cronless will execute it to ensure that the script is reachable and online. This is to make sure Cronless has a good URL to use and that you entered the user/password correctly (if necessary). If you don’t want Cronless to run the script at that time, put this at the beginning of your script while saving the job:
<?php
exit;
?>
Tip 2: Don’t want to modify your script with Tip 1? OK, rename the script and put in a temporary script that does nothing using the same filename. Following these simple steps:
- Rename your original script to something different (append “.ORIG” to the end, for example)
- Make a new PHP file with the same filename as your original script. Make sure you put in the <?php ?> for proper execution.
- Save your job on Cronless using the URL you want.
- Move your original script with new suffix (.ORIG) back to the server with the correct filename.
- Let Cronless do the rest!
Tip 3: If you have timeouts when running your script, make sure that you setup PHP to ignore the timeout value when running.
Tip 4: Using PHP to backup a database is very easy. Here’s a complete database backup script you can use.
Tip 5: Want to make sure your site is always online? Use Cronless’ Site Monitor feature when you upgrade to Webmaster Pro. We now have filters to ensure you only get critical failures and not false alarms.
Tip 6: Want to schedule some tweets? Here’s a great way to do that using Cronless.
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November 11th, 2009
Here’s an easy script to use to backup your database. Copy the contents of this script on your site as DBBackup.php and then you can create a PHP Cron Job to run it from here, once a day!
<?
// Run until complete
set_timeout_length(0);
// DB connection parameters
$host = ‘localhost’; //enter YOUR server
$username = ‘username’; //enter YOUR username
$password = ‘password’; //change to YOUR password
$database = ‘database_name’; //update with your DB
$path = ‘/home/username/backups/’; //Your backup directory (must be writable!)
$filename = $database.‘_’.date(‘Y-m-d_H:i:s’).‘.gz’;
$backup = $path.$filename;
$backup_command = “mysqldump –opt -h $host -u $username -p $password $database | gzip > $backup”;
if(exec($backup_command)==” && file_exists($backup))
{
echo “Backup successfully executed”;
}
else
{
echo “Error creating backup”;
}
?>
There are more sophisticated ways to backup your database, one table at a time such as described in this article, but they haven’t been moved to PHP5 yet so I would suggest this for advanced users only.
A great way to use your free cron jobs.
Tags: database backup, Tips
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November 6th, 2009
Cronless has now crossed the 8 million job threshold. That means Cronless has processed almost 1 job every 2 seconds for the past eight months straight!
Thanks for making Cronless a successful free cron job service!
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