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How To Fix The WordPress “Schedule Missed” Problem

Paul B — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:36:10 +0000

I’ve been having a major problem with scheduled posts for a week now, it just wasn’t working. I could watch posts count down to their scheduled time to go live but then they would just state “Schedule Missed”. Bummer. I was having to go in and do a quick edit, set as published to get anything that had been scheduled live. After some time playing with WordPress and it’s cron I finally got my scheduled posts up and running again, thought this might be of some use to anybody else having WordPress Schedule Missed problems.

So what actually caused my scheduling problem was the fact that I had been dicking around with my WordPress system time. You know that little section in your settings that lets you set your time zone? Because I’m in the UK yet I host in America I’d been shifting it around a bit (just to see if when I post makes any difference to traffic).

My educated guess is that because of this the WordPress cron had run at just the wrong moment and created a state where it then wouldn’t run again. Whatever logic to fire it wasn’t running. After an hour of messing around with the wp-cron.php code I figured it HAD to be a problem with the date/time comparison and the process not being called. No matter how many posts stacked up, no matter how I tried to alter the WordPress time zone to compensate, nothing would get posted – instead sticking as Schedule Missed.

The solution was simplicity itself. I needed to have the cron run again, update the date/time parameters so that from then on it would run OK. All I did was manually call it –

http://www.youblog.com/wp-cron.php

From that point onwards my schedule was back up and running and I can schedule posts to my hearts content. Not a complicated fix at all but it was a problem that was really bugging me.

Google Slaps The Directories (Again!)

Paul B — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 10:58:09 +0000

Google isn’t a big fan of link directories, they’ve got a proven history of slapping them all ends up. The trouble for the avid webmaster is that it seems that some directories tend to buck the trend and meet whatever quality guidelines Google sees fit to impose this week. These can be a very easy link. There is also the issue that some of my competitors seem to rank well using nothing other than directory backlinks, that hurts!

With this in mind and due to the fact that Google has again just slapped a load of directories I thought it was time I updated my directory list. You can now see for sure which directories still have page rank (as at todays date) and which have traffic (Alexa rank) and backlinks. The thing to remember about link direcories as well is this, Google may hate them BUT there are other less fussy search engines out that which to be quite frank, couldn’t give a toss.

As part of this update I’ve also updated the Find Domains tool. I hadn’t used it for a while so didn’t notice that Yahoo was getting all fussy a about which user-agents its API would accept. That’s fixed now although there is still the limitation on the number of lookups you can do in any 24 hours. I will get around to binning the API and getting the link info from somewhere else sometime soon.

Fixing A 3 Pixel Horizontal Gap In Internet Explorer 6

Paul B — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:54:34 +0000

So I’ve already explained how to fix what is probably one of the most annoying bugs in browser rendering history, the 3 pixel vertical gaps that appear between Divs in IE6. Whilst fixing this I also came across another bug that appears to insert a 3 pixel horizontal gap/margin when you add an element to a Div, here I’ll explain how to fix that one.

OK, you’re ready for it…remove line breaks from the source document. Seriously. In an amazing act of stupidity for some unknown reason Internet Explorer 6 takes the carriage return between the end of the opening Div tag and the begeinning of the element tag in the source document as a new line and insterts a 3 pixel gap between the top of the Div and the element.

For example this code:-

will render correctly in IE6 whilst

will not. It’s really as simple as removing the line breaks in your source document, now who would have thought that?!