Automate Your Business

Archive for March, 2009

If you are unlucky, you might be seeing the future-dated Caffeinated Content posts marked as “missed schedule” in your WordPress admin panel.

This is NOT an issue with Caffeinated Content or the scheduler.

It’s an issue with WordPress, that really ought to have been resolved by now. You can read more about it at via Google’s search results.

As you can see here, it’s not just an issue with auto-posting to WordPress via software:

While travelling as I checked my site on my mobile phone, there were no updates. I usually future post while travelling or on vacation to keep the blog current with new content. Though I always believed this system to be fool proof, it was surprising when I logged into WordPress admin to find red notes on the articles “Missed Schedule”.

Someone has released a plugin which seems to be good at fixing the issue, and you can read more about it here. But it’s up to you of course. I think I’ll just wait for the next WP release and hope it get’s fixed then.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve written a couple of posts about my automated Cpanel domain backup script. Well, I’m making it available for sale this week. It’s been sat there quietly taking backups for me, for a couple of months, and I’ve decided to turn it into a full product.

All I need to do is to write the user manual and package up the script with the installer, and it’ll be available to buy.

As with the Caffeinated Content Scheduler, I’ll be offering a subscriber-only discount for a little while – probably a week or two. And once that’s over, it’ll go back to the full price.

So if you’re interested in getting a discount, and you’re not yet an email subscriber, you can subscribe using the form to the right.

23rd APRIL UPDATE: It’s available now…

An important notice for Scheduler customers:

I’ve just uploaded v3.04 to the site. This fixes a few bugs, but it also improves the integration into your Wordpress Categories.

Full details of the changes are in the history.txt file in the download, which you can get from

http://www.automateyourbusiness.com/jvm2

Just log in, go to Account->My Purchases, and click the ‘Go’ link next to the Scheduler.

Full install/upgrade instructions are included in the PDF file that comes in the download file.

A question came up at the Warrior Forum, which is one I’d not thought about, so I’ll share the answer here as well:

“Andy… I have some questions.

Is this not true, cos if it is, why would a scheduler be needed if you can simply set the dates for the future?
(I have CC, just never used it).”

My response was as follows:

Caffeinated Content itself allows for a bunch of content to be grabbed in one batch, and it can spread the new posts over the timescales you define, from the past (to retro-actively fill in your blog and give it some apparent history) to the future (so new posts appear over the next few days/weeks).

There seems to be no limit on how far in the future you can create posts, but I guess that if you try to grab too much content at any one time, you’ll run into issues of timeouts, IP banning, etc. I’ve not tested this myself – just guessing base on [prior experience].

But once you’ve done that, you have to remember to log in again when you next need some new content – the plugin doesn’t automatically grab the next batch of content when the first one runs out.

The problem is: if you make CC grab content only for a few days at a time, to avoid any potential IP banning/timeout problems, it means you’re also having to log in on a regular basis and run the content grab. It doesn’t take much effort – it’s just a pain.

And if you grab lots of content at one time, assuming that you avoid timeouts/IP banning, then you’ll have to remember one day far in the future to upload content (again, multiplied by the number of blogs you have). I don’t know about you, but if I have something to do once every month, I’ve forgotten about it by the second month.

And finally, the plugin only allows content to be grabbed from one source (’S') at a time (eg, Yahoo Answers OR Youtube OR your uploaded articles files), for one set of keywords (’K') and only for that one blog (’B') that the plugin is installed on, and then allows that content to be spread over a number of days (’D').

So how many times do you have to do manual operation? S times K times B, every D days.

Not very nice if you have multiple blogs or sources.

My software allows you to:

1. Set up a schedule that grabs content from source ‘S’, using keywords ‘K’, to blog ‘B’, on a daily or weekly basis. It tells Caffeinated Content to spread that content over the following day or week.

2. Walk away, knowing that the same upload of content ‘S+K => B’ will run in one day or one week’s time. And the next day/week. And the one after that. All hands free.