Yesterday should have been the first occurrence of the automatic PTB podcast post on this site. Instead it turned into a comedy of errors that only resolved itself by, as far as I’m concerned, magic.
It started with my changing the cron time to something before midnight (my hosting is on the west coast, so the MP3 should be ready at wruw.org by 2:58am Eastern…), but I didn’t change the day of the week. Oops. ssh in, fix the crontab, and run the job by hand. OK, it ran, but where’s the post? Repeatedly try refreshing the feed. Nothing seems to happen.
Another fine feature I attempted to add was to change the pubDate tags in the XML to make the RSS feed validate (Month Day, Year isn’t good enough). My change actually broke the feed syndication’s parser, rendering the date to sometime in 1969, thus sticking the post at the bottom of time. Ugh! Decide validation can wait and change script back to Month Day, Year.
Login, change the date on the post to something reasonable. Still not showing correctly. WTF? Watch logs. Try various things. Nothing works. Decide using Typo for the new GIS site I’m messing around with’s blog was a good idea.
See something odd pass by in the logs. Something about wp-cron that was triggered by someone else’s visit to the site. Reload page. Hey! My edited post is now on top!
Now let’s see what happens next week…