Automatic Posting On WordPress Blogs (automated blogs)
There are several ways to manage automated posting and other functions on WordPress blogs (automated blogs).
automated blogs use three systems. The first is a cron job that runs roughly every other day. It triggers the Rss feeds that bring in news and other feeds from other sites across the internet. To ensure consistency and reliability we use an external cron service to provide the trigger that makes the new post appear. The service is set so that the timing is not exact, it changes a little each time the cron job runs.
Second we have future dated posts, these articles are inserted when the blog is installed but have a date of posting set sometime in the future, usually we set these articles to be posted at random times once each day.
Thirdly we have articles controlled by an WordPress plugin called wp-autocron, this provides a 'pseudo-cron' and is pretty reliable. It does not need a cron job to be installed on a server in order to work. But, wp-autocron is triggered by visits to the site by a human, or a search engine spider. If the site has no activity then no content is collected from the external sources. This is not really a problem as most sites are visited pretty regularly, usually by humans! If you see a time based function that does not seem to be working on your automated blogs, then try making a visit to your site. It might just be that, particularly on a brand new site, that you have not had a visitor for a few hours.
Filed under Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, LAMMs Techniques, What's a LAMM? by on Mar 18th, 2007. 
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