www.ThePolyBlog.ca — aka this site, which has a bunch of blogging stuff that I do. There are lots of subjects, and it has generally reflected the tagline / slogan — My view from the lilypads.
www.PolyWogg.ca — aka my writing site, The Writing Life of a Tadpole, which has been primarily been about HR and a bit of other stuff.
I’ve played with the sites over the years, moved stuff around, even debated the locations of certain types of files. However, that’s not surprising…how can the PolyWogg site be about my “writing”, yet I have over a million words on the ThePolyBlog site? Isn’t that writing too?
The funny part is that I asked for advice from friends some time ago, and one who has a marketing background saw it very clearly — PolyWogg was my professional writing stuff, ThePolyBlog was my personal stuff. I didn’t quite see it that way, too far in the weeds, but it was compelling if a little bit too early to commit.
The challenge was what to do with about 200 blog posts that rode the line between the two.
My dual life confuses even me
Take, for example, some blogs I have written about life in government. It’s not exactly about my HR guide, but it’s not unrelated either. I wrote about Phoenix audits, and audits in general, and how they work in government. But then the question — is that me writing about professional topics, as I do intend to do some writing on a series of government-related topics? Or is it me blogging about a current issue that I just happen to know more about than the average bear?
Or some articles about performance measurement or libraries, both of which I will write about in the future. Those are a little more related to future PolyWogg guides, and if I already had those guides written, these blog posts would clearly be housed in the same area as the guides.
Astronomy presents a different challenge. I write about MY experiences with astronomy, clearly a personal area, and thus clearly it should be on my personal site, right? Except I also intend to write a multi-stage PolyWogg Guide that will draw on a lot of those blogs, and like with performance measurement, if the astro guides were already done, then astro blogs would clearly go with them, right? I’d be blogging in support of my astro guide. It gets more complicated when I think about astro PHOTOS. I generally publish ALL of my personal photos on Flickr with links to my website, EXCEPT if I’m doing an Astro Guide, shouldn’t my astro photos be with it? Particularly as all of the photos in the guide will come from the same galleries.
And then just to really confuse things, I do book reviews. Almost EVERY writer out there who writes their own stuff AND also does book reviews keeps the book reviews on the same site as their own writing. Except I don’t really see it that way. My book reviews are just me writing about what I thought of the book, it isn’t something I’m doing to market myself or anything else. So, since they are more like my own book diary than anything to do with writing, I feel like they should clearly be on my personal site. Along with TV, Podcast and Movie Reviews. Seems logical to me.
Except I’m also doing music reviews of decades, which I will turn into books/PolyWogg Guides. So theoretically the music blogs should be with the future Guides and thus on my writing site where the books will be…yet then all my reviews aren’t together. I feel the same way about recipes — they’re mainly personal, but perhaps, someday, I’ll publish a collection of them…is that enough to put them all on the writing site?
I know what you’re thinking
You’re likely thinking that I’m being overly anal-retentive and over-thinking it all. But it does bear some thought.
When I came back from Bouchercon, I came back with a renewed sense of “writing” purpose. I am closer to retirement, and I have very concrete plans. Some of that starts with my PolyWogg site as my primary professional writing site, as my marketing major friend suggested as a way forward.
And here’s the weird part. Over the last year, I moved almost 140 posts from PolyWogg to ThePolyBlog so that PolyWogg was very clearly focused on my HR guide and a little bit on my Astronomy Guide. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the posts, keeping it lean. Then, after attending BoucherCon2025, I realized that a lot of content that I moved away are actually better placed back on PolyWogg and that I should start arranging my menus better. I have more content already written than I thought, across a broader spectrum of topics that will mushroom after I retire.
And if I’m frank with myself, likely before I retire. Or at least sooner than my original planned retirement date, regardless of when my date actually turns out to be. It’s in a state of flux at the moment.
So, this past week, I found 185 posts that I needed to move back. It could be another 300 if I moved my book reviews, which I’m not going to do. Another 300 if I included all my TV posts and reviews over the years, but again, those will stay with my personal site. I could probably conjure up another 30 things that COULD go to the writing site, but I feel like I’m moving towards the writing site only being those things that I intend to publish in some form other than my website, or at least are linked to similar publishable content.
But the truly funny part? I moved it around not that long ago, it made perfect sense to me, and this weekend, with a new “vision”, I moved it all back plus some more.
Even I don’t understand the nature of my digital duality. But I’m starting to, I think. Heck, I even ordered new business cards that say “writer, blogger” that I quite like even if I’m not using them yet.
Yet, partly as part of my retirement plans and partly as a result of Bouchercon convincing me that I need to be more entrepreneurial and perhaps more media-savvy with my approach, I’m working on ideas for a third site focused exclusively on a more marketable niche. I’ve been toying with some separation of content to prevent overlap between the non-fiction, fiction, and media-friendly stuff, even to the point of considering alternate noms de plume and trade names to protect some of my life from the net. But I know too that some of that is a fear that one of the three will fail i.e., I know the non-fiction is solid, but maybe the fiction won’t take off as I hope, or that the media-friendly stuff will fail spectacularly. Old-style concerns in publishing used to recommend using different names for each bit so that any failure in one area wouldn’t hurt your brand in another, but well…I am my brand. I’m PolyWogg. Have tail, will hop and type. Read, ribbit, repeat. If I want to really overthink things, there are MULTIPLE rabbitholes in the three areas to avoid or embrace.
But my first two sites are (not quite) locked and loaded, and I’m working on the third. I may not know ALL the versions of me yet, but I know the core one.
Earlier this week, I got an email saying one of my social media accounts had an unusual login, but it was nearby, and sometimes that happens normally when my one tool uses a different server, etc. or a bot runs from another setup. Not necessarily “me” accessing, but things that I authorized to access showing up on a server in another city nearby. It usually doesn’t do anything else, and often it isn’t even successful. I have a few accounts that didn’t quite have my latest passwords on them, but they were decent enough.
Tuesday, I went to a coffee shop in Nepean, and my VPN on my laptop wasn’t working. However, I also played an online game on Tuesday night that has a lot of stuff going on to run it. One or the other could have compromised my access, I suppose.
I’ve spent a lot of time tonight rebooting accounts, changing passwords, logging any other access out, and generally being paranoid AF. Of 8 things I use regularly, it compromised the four easiest. The second tier wasn’t hacked, and the third tier doesn’t look like it was even viewed. I still upgraded a ton of passwords tonight using a combination of tools and double-checking 2FA. Most are fine, and are the reason I was able to recover what I did. One remains outstanding, not that critical.
Still, quite annoying and tiring. My protections around the castle engaged when the Trojan Horse was opened, and mostly worked as intended. I’d like to write in more detail, but that would be incredibly stupid.
The bigger question is the vector of attack. One of the vectors may have started before Tuesday, except I can’t think of where or how really. The wifi network would be the obvious idea, or if I had used wifi while I was in New Orleans. But the whole time I was in New Orleans, I only used my phone as a hotspot, no wifi. Hmmm…
The fun that remains is when I go to access an app on my phone or load something on another computer and it says, “NO! You shall not pass!” because I haven’t logged into it with the new passwords.
Jacob has a higher-end gaming PC. Not top of the line, but certainly higher than the mid-range. Great graphics card, decent memory and speed, and a nice curved large monitor.
He comes down to see me yesterday afternoon and says, “Umm…my monitor stopped working.” Huh? Yep, he rebooted, did all the basic stuff, nothing. No signal to the monitor.
At the time, I was working my real job, so no time for much in the way of tech support. I gave him three possibilities:
1. Full shut down, see if the PC has somehow lost its setup info;
2. Try the monitor with a different source;
3. Try a different monitor.
He comes back later to say that the existing monitor works with another laptop, no problem, and the PC itself doesn’t work on other monitors. Excellent, we’ve narrowed it down to the PC. Right???? RIGHT???? Monitor works, PC doesn’t.
Now, there were some confounding variables to add to the mix. He’d been running a new game, and the refresh rate was dead slow. He had tried playing with graphics settings, downloaded a tool from AMD, and after that, nope.
I was initially worried he had fallen for some sort of scam pop-up, but it was indeed all legit. And nothing sounded like it should have screwed up too much, but maybe he lost his graphics drivers. My brain couldn’t decide if the PC would still send a proper video signal if the drivers weren’t on it, but I was wondering if maybe the graphics card went pffft.
I popped over to Canada Computers, where we bought it, and they weren’t busy so I said, “Hey, I might have the easiest fix ever. I think he just blew off the drivers.” Which the guy told me wouldn’t matter. It would still send the basic signal, even if only BIOS info. Huh.
He reached over to his computer for checking things in, unplugged the video feed and plugged it into the PC, added power, and voila, Jacob’s login came up. So, the PC **was** working. Just not with Jacob’s monitor. Or any monitor at the house. Huh?
We chatted about a few other things, but nothing that would give me a lead anywhere. But it was working.
So brought it all back home, plugged in again, nada. No signal to his monitor. We did have a small problem with Windows not being still registered, but apparently unrelated. Huh.
Jacob went off to have a bath, I started noodling. I literally couldn’t think of anything. Then it occurred to me that while we had shut the PC down to “nothing”, we had NOT reset the monitor, and it IS a smarter-than-average monitor. It has some internal memory, auto config stuff, etc. And since it plugs directly into the powerbar, not the PC, it is always “on” at least somewhat.
What if I shut it down too to fully off? I turned off the power bar and let everything go to zero. Nothing on, nothing running, etc., and let it stay off for about 5 minutes.
Then, I turned it all back on, started the PC…and got Jacob’s login on the screen, no problem. After his bath, Jacob reenabled the proper graphics drivers, tested all his normal games, and they all work. The “problem” one still didn’t, but we’ll deal with that on the weekend. The rest is running fine.
I’d love to say I’m a god for figuring out how to reset it, but well, all I really did was turn it off completely before turning it back on. Exactly what we tried multiple times, but as I said, the monitor was staying on and remembering that it didn’t like the previous signal from the PC and thus continuing to block it.
I can’t say I was looking to solve a hardware problem last night. But all’s well that fixes itself.
For those who engage in any sort of IT world, or anything that comes with a manual, the general joke is that 90% of all problems would be eliminated if you just “read the f***ing manual” (RTFM).
A few weeks ago, I noted that I had solved a chron problem with my website. Well, to be candid, the chron problem apparently solved itself, upgraded itself beyond its own obsolescence, or it just evaporated as a problem. Whereas I had problems previously where things I told it to post at say noon wouldn’t post at noon, or even at all until someone refreshed the website thus triggering an update, the chron suddenly started working. If I scheduled something for 12:30 p.m., it would publish at 12:30 p.m. It I said, 4:30 p.m., it would go at 4:30 p.m. More importantly, if I scheduled things so one would publish at 8:30 a.m., one at 12:30 p.m., and one at 4:30 p.m., AND had it go to my Buffer app to share things to social media at 9:00, 1:00 and 5:00, then lo and behold (!), it would indeed publish on time and Buffer would post it to media as per its separate schedule.
So I went back to looking at quotes and humour, and figured out a way to post them as pictures / images, with the text in the ALT area so it would still get indexed (i.e., if a joke refers to nuns, but the joke was a picture not text, a search for the word nuns would NOT pull up the page; if instead, I also add the text to the ALT text for the image, it will indeed find the word and show me the relevant post).
So why does all that matter?
Because before Chron was working and before I had images to share, I basically had to do things manually. If I wanted to post at 9:00, I had to go online and post at 9:00. If I wanted to post at 1:00 p.m., I had to go online and post. Otherwise, the people who subscribe to my website (rather than on social media) would get all the posts at once. Soooo, if I pre-posted a month’s worth of quotes? They would all go out at once by email. Not the best plan. Instead, I generally held myself to one post per day, and let it go out by email at whatever time but would tweak the settings in Buffer so it would look right. One day ahead. If I was too tired the night before, nothing went out.
Yet I’ve always had a bit of a challenge with sharing images with my posts to social media. From a WordPress site, there are essentially three possible images to choose from:
The featured image (FI) aka usually a smallish image next to your post … because of the way I designed my layout, the FI image sits outside of the main text to the left above the date;
An image embedded somewhere in the text; or,
An image embedded in the text and tagged with OPENGRAPH settings as an image to share.
Some social media sites have a priority of 1, 3, 2 for which image it will choose; others will do 3, 1, 2; and still others will do 2, 3, 1. There has been some challenge at times sharing what I want to share. I also don’t have some big IT department to figure this out for me. Because my FI photos sometimes are the ONLY photos in a post, I want it to use that image if there aren’t any others. When I do book reviews, I also include a copy of the book cover — usually category 2 above. On occasion, I insert other images and depending on how they are embedded, sometimes they use OPENGRAPH tags and sometimes not. Sigh.
Now, things get a bit more interesting. I mentioned above that I use Buffer as an online app that takes my posts from the WordPress site and acts as an intermediary with various social media sites — Facebook/Meta; Twitter/X; BlueSky; and Threads. And then gives me a fourth place to store photos for the post, ideally for sharing with social media.
I was struggling to get the right image to show up, and I frequently would still have to go in and edit the Buffer queue so that the right image would show. I would put in the photo I wanted into the #4 slot, but it wouldn’t show in the post. I read the text that went with it multiple times, and it didn’t seem to apply to what I wanted.
Ultimately, with this plugin, I now had FOUR places to put a photo and then four possible settings for the actual sharing to social media, so 16 combinations in all. I wasn’t looking forward to trying them all, to be honest. I had tweaked something last week to make my ThePolyBlog site look like what was posting from PolyWogg.ca, but it made it worse, not better. The quotes and humour “images” were no longer showing as previews in FaceBook — it was just the featured image (FI), so if anyone wanted to see the joke or quote, they had to click through to see it. Exactly what I was trying to avoid — I wanted the image versions to be more easily shared than forcing a click-through.
I decided to do a bit of work on it on Sunday night, and I figured the best option had to be somewhere in Option 4. It’s a separate area, as I said, where you can tell WP that these are the photos you want to share. And in fact, it is designed to share multiple photos, maybe even a little mini-gallery if you want. It wasn’t limited to one photo.
There was some generic text about adding images, but it recently updated the language on the screen. It now says:
The first image only replaces the Featured Image in a status where a status’ option is not set to “Use OpenGraph Settings”. Additional images only work where a status’ option is set to “Use Featured Image, not Linked to Post”.
I read that text a couple of dozen times over recent weeks and it was not really jiving. For sentence two, it’s talking about “additional” images but I didn’t have any additional images, I was just putting in one. Sometimes it took it, sometimes not. For the first sentence, you may notice that it is kind of badly worded.
While it says the first image replaces the FI when it is NOT set to “use OG settings”, but so what? I don’t really care if it replaces the FI when it isn’t set to that, I want it set to that. Don’t I? But then it hit me that the two sentences sort of work together.
My general posts have a Featured Image. The Open Graph settings are designed to add OG codes/tags to the Featured Image. So it should use FI and OG. Great. Except you have to change the settings from using OG to something where it is NOT using OG. Wait, what? Oh yeah, that’s the second phrase. If you set it to use an FI that is NOT the main FI linked to the post, then it will use the first image saved here in this box.
So while every website advice about sharing images says to use the regular FI and add the OG settings, this one tells me to NOT use the FI, not use the OG settings, and to use a different setting that doesn’t sound right at all. It goes against everything obvious in the approach. But, ultimately, it totally overrides letting the social media sites decide between #1-3 and tells it, regardless of what else is going on, just use whatever image I tell it to use in this setting (#4).
Bam! All four of my social media posts shared perfectly the next time. A book review with a cover, a quote as an image, and a joke as an image. All three “images” shared as the main pic with their posts x 4 different sites.
Because I RTFM, apparently. It’s not just a meme. The manual makes no SENSE, but that’s beside the point. It’s fixed.
Last week, I introduced TT — Tadpole Tuesday — where I blog about a current project that I’m working on. I started with some website stuff I was doing, namely putting quotes into shareable images and uploading those to the website. I had them in a different form, and I wanted to redo them to make them shareable. All good. But something odd happened on the way to the market, so to speak.
For a bit of background context, you need to know that my website is not a commercial enterprise, so it doesn’t have the complete set of bells and whistles that a whole business website might have. I have a small personal site, at a smaller price point, and a lot of manual management by me. It isn’t super sophisticated, I don’t have e-commerce options running on it, and it isn’t integrated with a warehouse for shipping products. It is a WordPress site running some plugins, and if I run TOO MANY plugins, the site stops loading everything. It runs out of memory, basically, while I’m working on it.
To load a webpage, one of two general options happens on hosted sites (full commercial or personal site).
On a personal site, my site sits somewhat dormant. It isn’t really DOING anything until someone asks it to do something. And technically, it doesn’t ask my site to do anything, it routes a request like load ThePolyBlog.ca home page; the internet routes that command to the hosting company I have my site with; the hosting company’s servers recognizes that it matches my site; and it sends a command to my personal sub-server area to “wake up and process this command”. Until it does that, my site is almost completely asleep.
By contrast, a full site runs constantly, like the hosting company’s servers do, looking to see if anyone is sending it a request, kind of like a dog jumping up and down saying, “Is it me? Is it me? Is it me? Is it me?”.
Think of it much like your own PC at home in hibernation mode vs. being “awake” and active. On your own PC, it is running much like my rented server space. It doesn’t do anything unless a timer goes off or someone taps the keyboard / loads a page.
Except for one little niggly detail. Timers would not work on my server.
I don’t have Chron for this
The timer on servers is generically called Chron. It is a traffic cop seeing which requests are coming in when, and processing them in order of their timestamp. And it has a timer. In theory, on just about every server known to exist, you can tell it that you want it to check mail, for instance, every 10 minutes. And every 10 minutes, it goes out and checks mail. Or once a day, it runs a backup. Or once every two days, it refreshes the cache. Or a whole host of regular things that require the timer to trigger them. Most run on their own, at least on most servers.
On my websites, the maintenance stuff for the servers doesn’t actually reside on my server, it sits on the hosting company’s servers. And their Chron works just fine. For my website, however, WordPress has to interface with the Chron timer, and well, they didn’t like each other very much. If the maintenance stuff didn’t run, this could be a problem, but the hosting company’s servers took care of that, leaving my server to just run whatever I want to run within WordPress. Except I don’t have anything that is time-based / schedule-based within WordPress. As I said, I don’t run anything commercial in it, so there’s no newsletter release, or content being pushed for sales notices, or carousels being updated with new ads.
Between 2005 and 2017, I was on various servers. And none of the Chrons would run reliably. In effect, my Chron went to sleep. Once something happened, like someone loading a page anywhere on the site, the server would wake up after the hosting server pinged it, it would sit up in bed, scramble to show whatever page was being requested, and then run Chron. So, if I had scheduled a post to go live at 9:00 a.m., it wouldn’t go live at 9:00 a.m. Chron was sleeping. However, if someone tried to load a page at 9:37 a.m., the server would wake up, show the page, and then run Chron, which would put the page/post live. The one that SHOULD have gone live while Chron was sleeping.
I worked with multiple support groups at different servers. For whatever reason, and it is not comforting to know this, some sites run Chron just fine and others are sleepy butts. Mine has always been a sleepy butt. I fought with it about 4 times, I think, over a 10-12 year period, but it was never a “must-have” for me. If it was, I could have upgraded my server package.
The only benefit that Chron could have given me was to allow scheduling of posts. So, again, if I was a larger enterprise with multiple posts per day and/or week, I could write them in advance (or other contributors could write them), and we could schedule them throughout the week. Jane’s post about corruption at City Hall could go live immediately while updating carousels and ads to go with it. Mike’s post about a cat family at the local park could go on Tuesday near the commute time. Blah blah blah. The comic strips for the week could be pre-loaded to post #272 on Monday at 8:00 a.m., 273 on Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., 274 on Wednesday at 8:00 a.m., and so on.
I don’t normally have that much content that I have to handle scheduling. Search engine optimization and blogging experts advice that if you want to grow your blog, you should post at a set interval, and monitor your take-up. If you know that people click through more if you publish in the afternoon, set your posts to go live in the afternoon; if they like mornings better, post in the morning; if Thursday and Friday are better than the weekend, then post by noon on Friday or wait until Monday for anything else. Have a schedule and stick to it.
Great advice, very logical. And my response has almost always been “meh”. While I would like to boost interaction so that I know SOMEONE is reading my stuff, I’m going to blog regardless. My past research shows that people click when they like, not when I want them to, and because all my sharing is through social media, it depends more heavily on when they read and what their algorithms do with my posts, than what time of day it got posted. Obviously, I don’t want to dump 100 posts in a single day. But since they are always delayed viewing anyway, I feel it is more about the type of posts I do in a single day than the content. For example, I feel like I can post at most one good medium to long post per day. Like this one. But a quote is a single image, and a joke will be a single image. I can add that to my daily feed without overwhelming the recipients. The question is how to queue that up properly.
Buffer is like the Chron I never had
I use Buffer as my social media manager. The way it works is you add a “channel” to Buffer, say your Facebook page; you go in and edit all the settings for that channel and how you want it to post to Facebook with extra words, the order of various fields, which image to use (a default image, a featured image, the first image in a post, etc.), and a number of other features and formats; AND you tell it the schedule to use. This goes back to the advice from blogging experts. For me, I said, “Okay, publish to the Facebook channel at 9:00 a.m. every morning”. That was the only time in the queue. If I wrote a post at midnight and pressed publish, WordPress would send that post to Buffer, Buffer would put it in the next slot (9:00 a.m. the next morning) and when the slot came up, Buffer’s Chron would send / post it to Facebook. In theory, I could write 20 posts over a weekend, tell it to post them, and they would be live on the website immediately. But Buffer would add them into the queue and send them out one per day for the next 20 days. It was the only time I really wanted Chron. Alternatively, I could write all the posts and save them as pending for now. Then, each day, I could open the next post, and say PUBLISH. It would go out in the next slot, likely 9:00 a.m. the next morning. If I missed a day, it didn’t go.
Except I hate having to run Chron manually. And Buffer is okay, but not exceptional. If, for example, I wrote 20 book reviews and had them all queued up, they would occupy the slots for the next 20 days. If I then wrote a great post about some news item, Buffer would add it to the queue in the 21st slot. If, instead, I wanted it to go out “immediately” or the next morning at least, it was not easy to bump it up in the queue. Oftentimes, I’d be manually moving stuff around, or adding an extra push one day.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Chron on a website isn’t a lot better. It can be challenging to move things around relative to each other. You can easily say, “Hey, send this one at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow”, but the previous one would also be scheduled to go at 9:00 the next morning, so it would go too. People get around this by embedding schedulers into their website. Adding Buffer’s functionality to the website. Except it requires Chron to run.
And the circle is complete. Buffer and WordPress work better together if both Chrons work; if only Buffer’s Chron works, it can handle most issues, but changes on the fly are sometimes more painful than I would like. I know, however, there ARE ways to go into the complex settings of Buffer and say, “Okay, here’s the schedule for the week…there’s a slot at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. The 1:00 p.m. slot should use this complex FILTER and send a post IF and ONLY IF it has the category of QUOTES”, for example. It’s a bit more complicated than that, and it has never been worth my time to go in and figure it all out. I don’t have that many posts in a queue usually.
Part of that queue avoidance is tied to the issue of people who subscribe directly to the website. At first, I didn’t realize this was happening, although I should have. When I did a bunch of movement of posts between websites, I essentially imported 100 posts from PolyWogg and posted them to ThePolyBlog. These were posts that had already been shared, were all old, and so I didn’t think of them as “new”. But, of course, ThePolyBlog site saw them as new and TREATED them as newly published content. It sent all 100 posts to Buffer, overloading my queue. And it sent 100 posts out to those who were subscribed. So their inboxes got flooded. With old content. Whoops.
So, when I work on my site, I have to remember to turn off the post to subscribers function. And to remember to turn it BACK on afterwards. If I queue, say, 20 quotes to go out Monday to Friday over the next month, it will work fine for Buffer. But the people who are subscribed directly will get 20 posts immediately. WordPress makes them live immediately. Grrr…
Website, heal thyself
The funny thing that happened last week is that Chron seems to work now. WTF?
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I don’t know when. But Chron is working on my site.
As I mentioned, I’m redoing 93 Quotes posts. Which basically means I copy them to a new post, add in the image version, and repost as a new post, before deleting the old post. If I process all 93 at once, my subscribers will get 93 emails in a day. If I want to avoid that, I can turn off the newsletter feature / share post option until I get them all updated, but then my subscribers don’t get that content. It’s efficient to do all 93 at once, a lot of repetitive steps, and in about two hours, I could blast through all of it. Or maybe an hour here and there, do it over a couple of days. But again, I have to avoid them going out to the subscribers too often. Buffer can handle my social media, I just wish they had a newsletter option (something I can check on for future, it would be great to move my subscribers OFF my website overhead).
Last weekend, I set up a quote post. I didn’t want to add it to the queue and publish immediately, so I saved it as pending. And then, just for fun, I told WordPress to publish it at 8:30 a.m. I wanted to see how it would handle the subscription feeds to individuals. I figured it would eventually get “flagged” when someone loaded the website, and even if it didn’t go at 8:30, well, it would go sometime that day. I would check at lunch, and if it hadn’t gone, I’d load the page and trigger it myself.
On Monday morning, my phone buzzed at 8:30 and then buzzed repeatedly at 9:00. I was getting dressed, and it buzzed twice which I ignored and then four times in under a minute. I thought someone was calling me, which is exceedingly rare, and I’m not even a huge texter. At 8:30, my Chron had run all on its own. Like it would on a bigger server. Somehow, WordPress and my server decided to get along and Chron ran on time. Maybe it’s been able to run for five years, which is the last time I tried to fix it. Maybe it just fixed itself last week. I have no idea. But it ran.
Which then meant it sent a full copy of my post to my main email address. Then it sent a short copy of the post to my secondary email address (sending it twice in two different forms lets me see what my subscribers are seeing, and I save it in email as a backup). Then Buffer entered the chat 30m later, and told me it had shared my post with a) FaceBook/Meta, b) Twitter/X, c) Blue Sky and d) Threads. Exactly on time. Because Chron ran on its own.
Holy snicker doodles.
Do I need this functionality? No. Do I want this functionality? Sure. Will I use this functionality? Absolutely.
The first case will be my quotes. I can set up all 93, queued to go live over various days, likely Monday, Wednesday and Friday at lunchtime. I’ll also queue up some jokes to go on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the same time. I’ve already modified Buffer to give me three send times a day — 9:00 a.m. that I’ll use for blog posts; 1:00 p.m. that I’ll use for shorter posts; and 5:00 p.m. that I’ll use for reviews. All I have to do is set my Chron / WordPress to push the content live about 30 minutes before the slot. Then, the slot will accept the post and share it on the schedule set with Buffer. It probably needs about 2 minutes’ lead time to accept it, but I’ll give Buffer more like an hour.
After all the times the website seemed to break almost on its own, I’ll take the win from it fixing itself on its own. Now I just have to post the content. And as a further test, I’m writing this post on Sunday to go out Tuesday for my Tadpole Tuesday series. Fingers crossed.
