[wp-hackers] ALTERNATE_WP_CRON... Is it worth it?

[Mike Schinkel]

> Ideally, those would not show up very often.

My preference would be it never shows up.  

The URL is a public interface so I like it to stay clean.  It's an okay workaround for end-user bloggers w/o a technical staff ALTERNATE_WP_CRON doesn't seem a proper solution for anyone who has a server admin or has server admin skills and especially not for a high traffic site. IMO of course.

So what if a post goes viral on Twitter?  Some of the links will have doing_wp_cron= and some may not, for example.

> And even when the link does get saved or shared, it doesn't really
> affect anything. The flag is ignored for everything that isn't cron
> related.

According to RFC 2616 3.2.3 URI Comparison[1]:

"When comparing two URIs to decide if they match or not, a client SHOULD use a case-sensitive octet-by-octet comparison of the entire URIs (with exceptions that don't matter in this case.)"

So any search engine or bookmarking service following the spec will see the URL with and the URL without as two different URLs.

> The best option is to make it so that your server is capable of making
> http hits back to itself.

Yes. That, or set up a real cron task.

-Mike

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.2.3