I use DreamHost to host my blog and while it’s a great and fairly inexpensive service, there are some limitations. One is that you cannot run cron jobs without a shell account, which I do not have. A cron job is a frequently executed task, mainly used for running scripts on a frequent basis for website maintenance. While I already do this on my Windows server and I could use it for my needs here at chrisTHIS.com, I wanted to see if there was another way to schedule a cron job for the average Joe Blogger.

I set out looking for web-based cron services and found a few. Here are my reviews of each. None of these are affiliate links, nor am I associated with any of these services. I am providing my honest personal opinions. If you know of more, please let me know!

Read the Rest of ‘Review: Web hosted cron job schedulers’

I spent the evening “pimping out” my WordPress blog scripts a bit more. I found a cool Flickr badge replacement that is not Flash (shown to the right), added in a plug-in to easily add videos to my blogs, added in my Nike+ run widget, Twitter summary, and perhaps the coolest thing ever: the ability to blog by email/phone with photos.

I first tried the Flickr WordPress integration, but it didn’t work well at all. It did post a blog, but it completely ignored my text and for some reason ended up making 3 posts instead of 1! Weird! I ended up going with a WordPress script called Postie that does the job, and does it extremely well. The only problem I ran into was I don’t have access to cron with my current Unix host, so I found a web-based cron service that was easy to set up and works great.

This means that not only can I now send messages to Twitter using SMS on my iPhone, but now I can also snap a photo and email it to my blog, along with a headline (email subject) and a description (email body). Now that is some cool stuff.