Cronless - Free Cron Jobs
Development Blog for Cronless.com

Archive for December, 2009

Happy New Year from Cronless

Thursday, 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!

Hot Tips for your Cron Job PHP scripts

Tuesday, 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:

  1. Rename your original script to something different (append “.ORIG” to the end, for example)
  2. Make a new PHP file with the same filename as your original script.  Make sure you put in the <?php ?> for proper execution.
  3. Save your job on Cronless using the URL you want.
  4. Move your original script with new suffix (.ORIG) back to the server with the correct filename.
  5. 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.

Eight Crazy Ways To Notify You

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Cronless now has eight ways to notify you when your free cron jobs are executing:

  • Email (default)
  • SMS
  • IM (MSN, Yahoo, GTalk and AIM)
  • Twitter

In addition, site monitoring now has the ability to override the notification, so you can just watch your sites without being notified, or only get notified after 5, 10, or 15 consecutive failures.  That way you get only the serious failures and not the random network glitches that cause false alarms.

Take the new cron job tour and find out why Cronless is the best service out there.