Looking for a way to vary the posting/pinging times

[David]

I didn't see any way of varying the posting and pinging. So if I set a cron to post at say 6:03 every day, my posts are all going to be at 6:03.  It would be nice to have a way to vary this.

RSS To Blog and SEO Blog Builder have timers built in tha your cron starts. So they post and ping at some random time aftr the timer starts.


Is there anything like this in the works?

Thanks,

David

[rfwarrior]

Bearing in mind I've not even installed Blogsolution so this could be the dumbest answer on the board (as I'm not fully aware of what it does)

Could you not schedule 4 seperate crons for different times throughout the day.  Each one posting 1 or 2 posts?

e.g

one at 8:00,   one at 12:47, one at 18:24 and one at 21:03

[David]

Yes, you can!  But you still get them at the same times every day. I suppose I could set up a larger number to hide that, and then have each one post to a smaller number of blogs. Not a good solution though when you have a ton of blogs.

Thanks,

David

[kent1]

Maybe something like this could be put into the aggregate, ping, and batch index files.


$sleeptime = rand(1, 30) * 60;
sleep($sleeptime);

//rest of script here
?>
I rather not test it out myself.

[texgsh]

David - with multiple cron jobs and percentage blogs posted too - you get some mixing - although the actual post time is the same it just gets scattered across the blog as each blog gets picked by the % function

I am doing 25% on the blog posts and have 4 crons for posting.

I am just pinging once a day for all blogs right now - suggestions?

Tex

[kent1]

The code below will give some randomness.  It works for me...although hard coding into TBS for random posting an pinging would be nice in the future.


$sleeptime = rand(1,30) * 60;
sleep($sleeptime);

include 'index.php';  //call up the real post script after sleeping

?>
Make a new file with only the code above for each of the batch, aggregate, and pinging folders.

Instead of making a cron for each of the index files in these folders, make crons to these new files you made as talked about above.

This will vary execution randomly in a range of 30 minutes from cron time.  You could increase the number 30 higher to make a wider range.
This method works for me but I of course can't guarantee it will work for you.

[OhKarri]

Thanks for the idea Kent and it works great!!