I just learned how to schedule future posts on this blog, which uses Movable Type 4 blogging software. Click below if this subject interests you.

On NYU’s implementation of Movable Type Enterprise, I’d been able to schedule posts without any difficulty. But it wasn’t working here at patell dot org. it occurred to me that there was probably some setting that I had to change on the control panel for my blogging account at Living Dot.

After a quick check of Living Dot’s Knowledgebase, I discovered the “cron job.”

Cron jobs allow you to automate certain commands or scripts on your site, including scheduling of posts for Movable Type 4. Here’s what I had to do to implement it.

First, I went to my Control Panel and clicked on the icon for “Cron Jobs” in the “Advanced Section.” On the next screen, I chose the option for “Standard Experience,” which yielded a screen into which I entered an e-mail address (to which acknowledgments or error messages would be sent each time the job is run) and the followin important command, which I customized to reflect the actual direct path of my installation:

cd /full/path/to/your/mt/install/; ./tools/run-periodic-tasks

Following advice from this webpage from the “Learning Movable Type” site, I set my job to run every fifteen minutes of every hour of every day of every week. In the future, I’ll probably limit the job to a few specific times when I want the script to run.

The first time that script ran, I received a “Permission Denied” error message. That’s because I also needed to go to the File Manager in my account, locate the “tools” directory of my Movable Type Installation (in my case, /cgi-bin/mt/tools), and change the permissions on the “run-periodic-tasks” file to UNIX 0755.

The next time the script ran perfectly.