Over the years, I occasionally come across projects that require a cron job. Be it to send out scheduled emails, import data from external sources, or simply do a daily backup.
As many would know, the best wordpress hosting service has a built in cron system. By default, this runs during each page load allowing the cron to be active without needing to setup a server side cron job. The downside, is that it requires a user to actually load the site, making exact scheduling unreliable if the site isn’t very active at the scheduled time.
In this little “tutorial”, I’ll show how I setup a type of cron daemon that doesn’t require server access or configs. While not a true daemon, it does give a very similar result. (more…)