Scheduled posting for Movable Type!

Trickle is a perlscript by blogneighbor Jim Flanagan of Everything Burns that enables publish-on-date style posting to the future under MT, my personal biggest missing feature. The script was developed in response to requests from another blogneighbor, Dan Sanderson of BrainLog.

Now I just have to go back and figure out why vanilla cron misbehaves on my OS X box. It’s surely aslo an excuse to finally install Cronnix.

Jim’s solution is elegant and simple, but like all users, my inelegant and complex needs stub a toe. In this case, it’s the use of a category as the publication key. Jim asks users to assign a new category, “Deferred,” to the draft entres you’re queueing up. However, even if I assign a dual category to my post-to-the future, I’ll still wind up with a new category and category achive page, “Deferred,” unless I rummage around to ensure that that specific category is treated in a special way.

It should be noted that Jim’s made the category assignable and configurable as an independent variable at the top of the script.

Perhaps that’s my key: can I assign the variable to ALL categories, such that any post in Draft mode with a future date will render under Trickle the next time after that date? I bet so. Can I do it via “*”? One way to find out.

Alternatively, I could just comment the category test, maybe.

UPDATE: rowsabowsa ragga fragga, I’ve burnt my twenty minutes with no love. I shall return. I believe I’m bumping against some of the same issues that frustrated me previously regarding cron and OS X, and not issues in Jim’s code.

On proofreading this piece, maybe I’ve brought a typo to the table. Fumblefingers!

UPDATE II: Point one: Jim actually notes in the code proppah that the script will strip the Deferred category from the entry.

Point two: the script needs to be in the same directory as your mt.cgi stuff (although I’m sure that’s hackable).

Point three: for the record, “*” is not a valid value for the Deferred category. It’s not necessary to worry about entries piling up in your Deferred archive, though, as MT won’t render empty categories. This does mean one should assign dual categories to your entries.

Point four: The execution problems I was having were a combination of pathing and permission problems. The successful use of the script I’m describing above was manually triggered from the command line. When I get it to run using Cronnix I’ll add an update here.

UPDATE III: manually via Cronnix, yes; scheduled via Cronnix, not yet.

UPDATE IV: scheduled via Cronnix, if Cronnix is currently loaded as an active application, yes; scheduled via Cronnix for cron to run solo, not yet.

UPDATE V: Success! Cronnix skedded-jobs ran independently via cron, just as one would want them to. I deleted several (but not all) test posts.

UPDATE VI: reset creation time to force to lead story slot.

Cory at Boing Boing links to Brad Templeton‘s reflections on and survey of spam and how we got here. Cory highlights a part of Templeton’s essay that echoes my own interest in the subject: spam has the power to contort consistent rhetorical and political positions into their logical opposites. Since Boing Boing uses an inline permalink system I’ll actually run Cory’s excerpt:

Spam fascinates me because it sits at the intersection of three important rights — free speech, private property and privacy. It’s also the first major internet governance issue (possibly in tandem with DNS) that the members of the internet community have been so deeply concerned with.

The reaction to it has been remarkable. By attacking something we hold dear, and goading us by using our own tools and resources to do it, spam generates emotion far beyond its actual harm, even though that actual harm is quite considerable.

Spam pushes people who would proudly (and correctly) trumpet how we shouldn’t blame ISPs for offensive web sites, copyright violations and/or MP3 trading done by downstream customers to suddenly call for blacklisting of all the innocent users at an ISP if a spammer is to be found among them. People who would defend the end-to-end principle of internet design eagerly hunt for mechanisms of centralized control to stop it. Those who would never agree with punishing the innocent to find the guilty in any other field happily advocate it to stop spam. Some conclude even entire nations must be blacklisted from sending E-mail. Onetime defenders of an open net with anonymous participation call for authentication certificates on every E-mail. Former champions of flat-fee unlimited net access who railed against proposals for per-packet internet pricing propose per-message usage fees on E-mail. On USENET, where the idea of canceling another’s article to retroactively moderate a group was highly reviled, people now find they couldn’t use the net without it. Those who reviled at any attempt to regulate internet traffic by the government loudly petition their legislators for some law, any law it almost seems, against spam. Software engineers who would be fired for building a system that drops traffic on the floor without reporting the error change their mail systems to silently discard mail after mail.

It’s amazing.

Oh good god, I gotta get to work.

pf.org: Nomen, Prenomen: the 2003 All-Name NFL Draft Team.

Geez, I’m linkin’ up a storm here today.

KRAZY KAT: an epic post from the redoubtable y2karl. Each letter in the actual post itself is a link to a Krazy Kat resource; Karl quixotically annotated each link via mouseover text.

In the discussion partway down he discusses his technical procedures on the post. 😉