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Archive for November, 2009

Tip: Cronless Can Schedule Tweets

Monday, November 16th, 2009

I found a great service called ScheduledTweets that works perfectly with Cronless–a scheduling service for your Twitter account.

Some info from the site:

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ScheduledTweets is built with PHP, uses MySQL to store the data & its interface is fully Ajaxed.

It enables you to define time-intervals which your tweets will be sent every x minutes. You can enter unlimited tweets, drag’n drop your tweets to change the order they will be sent.

Also, URL shortening service TinyURL is integrated for shorter tweets.

ScheduledTweets comes with a web-based friendly installer that helps you define database & Twitter information easily.

Why Use ScheduledTweets?

Twitter is both an instant messaging & a micro-blogging platform. You will probably not schedule your personal tweets (I won’t, as it clearly becomes meaningless) but if you are regularly sharing stuff on a subject, then it has the same benefit as scheduling a post on a blog.

Installation couldn’t be simpler:

  • Create a MySQL database & user
  • After downloading it, unzip the files to a folder & upload them to your hosting account
  • Run http://www.yourdomainname.com/scheduled-tweets-url/index.php
  • Define the MySQL database information you created in the first step. Also define your Twitter info and desired ScheduledTweets admin info
  • Click install
  • Setup a cron job to http://www.yourdomainname.com/inc/functions.php?getAction=cronTweet (the interval must be lower than your smallest interval defined in ScheduledTweets)
  • Click “Start ScheduledTweets” button at the top menu
  • That’s it

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I personally recommend using Cronless’ free cron jobs to schedule those tweets!  ;)

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PHP Tip: How to Backup Your Database

Wednesday, 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.

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Eight Million Jobs!

Friday, 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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Tweets for Job Failures

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Coming soon!  A new feature will be available for you:  The ability to receive TWEETS for Job failures.

And even better, you’ll be able to receive various IM notifications (Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM) in addition to MSN.

Just another reason to upgrade to Premium for Cronless.

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