Sheila's Posts

I feel much better now that I’ve gotten out of a tangled mass of prickly plants that were only getting thornier with each passing day, week, and month (since autumn began last year!). Not much unlike how you feel when thorns grab your clothing and make progressing forward painful, the company that once hosted my sites can no longer snag my page loads or leave them stuck unable to appear. If I waited until May the 22nd to relocate my sites onto a different hosting server — due to a two-year pre-paid subscription with Netfirms and their no refund policy — I wouldn’t have a shred of sanity left!

Now that I’m finally out of that brier patch and can move along at a pace that’s decent for page loads, I can begin to let my festering wounds from unceasingly unacceptable frustration levels heal.

What pushed me past my limit was having pages timeout just when I’d be feeling good about having found solutions for WordPress irritations. The annoyance level of the page loads combined with some of the bugs that come attached with the newer WordPress versions were not making my days travel efficiently productive.

I’m very persistent when it comes to fixing things and tend to get intolerant of inconvenient conveniences while doing so. For example, I got fed up with WordPress’s excessive autosave, broken scheduler, and invalid “role” attribute. To make matters worse, the tweaks for the “missed schedule” headache weren’t working for me even though they seemed to for many others who applied them.

Untwisted Vortex tells how to adjust WordPress autosave or disable it completely, obus3000 brings Missed Schedule posts back to life, and Longworth.eu gives great instructions on how to remove WP’s invalid attribute from the search form in a not so WC3 compliant blog.¹

Postscript — I thought the autosave occurring so often was to blame for the posts not publishing when scheduled, but it wasn’t. Here’s what I wrote a couple of days ago (with the name “Missed Schedule Nightmare”) and deleted after trying out my new plugin to see how well it works:

This nightmare didn’t require me to go to sleep. In fact, trying to solve this mystery has prevented me from being able to get sleepy. Maybe after I write about it and check to see if I’m not dreaming now, then I can go to sleep before the sun comes up.

After writing my previous post about disabling autosave, I wanted to check to see if my new install of WordPress would publish the post on schedule. I was feeling pretty good about quickly the solution worked. Little did I know what was coming next!… or more like what wasn’t coming next.

For hours I repeatedly tried to get my scheduled post to publish itself. Why? Because I kept thinking, “This one more try will do the trick.” The one more, led to one more, etc., etc. Not too many things bug me quite like thinking I’m so close to figuring something out, but yet can’t do so.

I don’t know why the suggestions that worked for most other people with their blogs would not work for me. But, when the solution does come, it can come so fast that it’s hard to know whether to be happy it did or mad that it took so long to find.

Most of the pages of suggestions I came across dealt with altering the cron.php file. By the time I arrived at a plugin called Missed Scheduled, something about the words, “Brings Missed Schedule posts back to life.” gave me instant hope (probably because of seeing all four of its rating stars nicely yellow!).

I’m probably still typing this because I’m a bit nervous to actually double check to see if the Missed Schedule nightmare is really over. If I don’t say anything more, it means I finally went to bed because of knowing the plugin really did work and it will still be working when I get up in the morning.

(The Missed Scheduled plugin still works!)

¹The instructions were there when I first published this post, but not anymore.