cron

At the end of my recent post on building a cron service for your Zend Framework application, I mentioned a couple of weaknesses in the approach I took. Most notably, my cron service lacked any kind of locking mechanism to prevent cron runs from overlapping.

Recently, in a fit of narcissism, I decided that my blog needed to be Twitter-aware; that is, I wanted all my posts to display automatically-generated lists of all Twitter tweets that reference them (via the backtweets.com API). Loading these backtweets is a bit resource-intensive, so I figured it'd be best to offload the work to a scheduled background task (e.g., a cron job).