Does anyone out there know why Movable Type must be so extraordinarily hard to install and/or upgrade?

Second, does anyone know why no one helps anyone on their Support forum, or why, when someone does try to help, they have to be one of those techie jerks that talks to you like you can’t add two and two?

Learning Movable Type has an interesting post about scheduled postings and cron jobs. A cron job is an automated task set to run in the future. If you have MT 3.1x, you have probably noticed you can save a post as “draft,” “publish,” or “future.” In order to make use of the “future” post status, you need to create a cron job.

Elise and Arvind do a wonderful job explaining how to do this, and their tutorial works very well, although I noticed my post did not occur *exactly* when I set it to occur; however, it posted soon after that. It was probably my server and nothing to do with their instructions.

When might you want to save a post for a future date?

• When you want to commemorate a special event, like a birthday, holiday, anniversary, etc.
• When you are going out of town, but want to continue to post to your blog, because daily posting (or something close to it) is important to you.

I did not find, as Elise and Arvind indicated, that the cron job needed to be set to run every fifteen minutes of every hour, day, week, and month, but my server’s cron job configuration may be different. That just seemed a little excessive to me.

How will you know if it works? Well, I set this to post on Friday morning. If it works, then you’re reading this. I promise not to cheat and change the draft status to “publish” if it doesn’t.

Update: It appears to have worked! By the way, I figured out the issue with cron job not running as scheduled. The folks who host PlanetHuff are located in the Pacific time zone. The cron job I set to run at 8:00 actually ran at 8:00 PDT, which was 11:00 EDT. You may want to find out if you would have the same problem. Also, make sure the permissions to your file “run scheduled tasks” located in your “tools” folder under wherever you have MT installed, are set to 755. I tried to run a cron job on my other web site and received a permission denied error, because I forgot to change the permissions.

I have been happy with MT-Blacklist. I have had no comment spam since I put in some common key words to block. I have noticed that more trackback spam seems to get through. I installed MT-Moderate, which seems to do a great job moderating trackback spam. Sometimes I would get 20 trackback spams a day, and while that is nothing compared to what larger blogs must get, it was still a pain to deal with. The last time I opened up Blacklist, I noticed a new item posted under “Blacklist News.” Brad Choate has come up with a brand new plugin called SpamLookup. If you manage your content with Movable Type, you should definitely check it out. If this works like it should, spam should be a thing of the past. If I haven’t convinced you, go see what Jay Allen had to say about it.

Tech support from my host wrote me back today. I guess I have to take back my premature rant, because this actually went very smoothly. Maybe the incident from this summer was an anomaly. They installed Storable perl module, so now I’ve got MT Blacklist, MT-DSBL, Real Comment Throttle. Once I read the documentation and figure out what I can do with it, I’ll be using Book Queue Too instead of All Consuming to keep track of my booklist. I like All Consuming okay, but it is off-site, and having things in one place might be easier.

Oh, and here’s a clever poem via Roger Darlington’s blog.

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