

Tell HN: Check out my app, RunMeLater, Web Service for CRON Jobs/Scheduled Tasks - dannyr
http://www.runmelater.com/

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m0th87
I really like this idea! A few suggestions:

* Is there no way to delete a task? I wouldn't consider using it unless there were, because it would get awful annoying if I needed to change the schedule but was incapable of doing so.

* It would be nice if there were more options for the HTTP request (most especially sending POST parameters, but also stuff like HTTP auth would be useful)

* Perhaps nitpickey, but could you make the interface more RESTful? That is, POST to create an unnamed task, PUT to create/update a named task, DELETE to remove, GET to get information about a task.

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dannyr
m0th87,

I plan on adding them in the near future (e.g. delete task, POST, Http Auth).

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mtrichardson
If you're wanting to be more RESTful, you should be creating tasks with POST
instead of GET, since you're creating new resources. How do you cancel tasks?
Might I suggest a DELETE to a URL, specified in the return?

~~~
admn_is_traitor
eh?

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dannyr
Thanks for the comments. I'll definitely improve on the documentation.

I decided to release it on HackerNews first because I know you guys would
understand what I'm talking about.

I wanted a service like this when I was using a shared hosting account for my
website. The host doesn't give you a lot of access to the servers and set up
CRON jobs.

~~~
dustineichler
Danny this is awesome, good job!

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jmonegro
Let me design a better website for you. Not mindblowing, as I don't have much
time, but better.

EDIT: For free, by the way.

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andrewpbrett
I don't think it's completely awful - it's a matter of what you're comparing
it to. If you're pitting it against a slick, non-technical consumer facing
site, sure, it's a little text heavy. But if you're comparing it to a typical
API doc, it's a pretty good combination of style and utility.

~~~
cmelbye
I find it somewhat hard to read and follow. Not really a problem with the
design, more a problem with the layout, text size, and font.

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maxklein
You know what would be cool? If it could send me a summary of what my script
told it. For example, I do batch sending of emails every 10 minutes. It should
tell me at the end of the day: Sent 120 emails. 3 emails failed, they are
max@max.con, max@max.ckom etc.

I still wouldn't pay for this - it's too easy for me to setup cron for me to
pay you to do this for me. You'd have to offer me a lot more compelling
reasons to pay you for this.

~~~
dannyr
Thanks for the suggestion. Definitely would consider it.

Setting up CRON jobs is not that easy for those people who don't have a lot of
control of their servers.

I myself am not sure if this is good enough as a standalone product. I do have
some business ideas for it though.

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Barnabas
For ideas on how others have done this (including business model and pricing),
check out <http://www.webcron.org/>.

Ah, this site takes me back to an online ballot box stuffing incident earlier
in the year...

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midnightmonster
I've read a case study of someone with essentially this service trying to make
money by offering a pro service. It's not going well.

So it might be hard to get enough people to pay for it to make it a
sustainable business, but at the same time I would have a hard time
recommending anyone do anything important through a free service where I
couldn't see what the provider was getting out of it.

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jamesbritt
* Renders poorly on Firefox 2.something on Vista. Basically same issues as others have noted

* Use of the word "cron" threw me off. I was wondering how your Web service was going to interact with the cron service I have on my machines. But, of course, that's not what it does at all.

Suggestions: Fix the layout, and make it obvious what problem you are solving.

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jeroen
Rendering on the iphone isn't perfect either. There are some errors in the
html. Fixing them might improve the rendering. See

<http://vldtr.com/?key=runmelater>

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jacquesm
How do you stop people from using this to waste other peoples resources ?

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brk
How do you stop those people now?

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jacquesm
That's besides the point, if you are making it possible for a third party to
use your server to fetch resources you should probably make sure the service
can not be used as a simple attack vector.

~~~
dannyr
jacquesm,

I considered that so I have restrictions for now (e.g. no hourly jobs, limit
of up to 30 occurences for daily jobs, etc.).

I'll figure out a way to verify that you own the domain of the Url you're
trying to access. The simple way is by email address from the same domain.

~~~
jacquesm
Cool. Nice to see you thought about that ahead of time.

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robryan
I think with the market you would be aiming for you would want to make this as
simple to use as possible. I'd ditch even really making much mention of CRON
and make a solid and easy to use UI for setting up the tasks. Your really
aiming for the crowd that uses basic shared hosting so the simpler the better
with the web service taking a back seat.

As a business model possibly you could make viewing the results of jobs and
stats visible on the website only for people that use the UI to create. People
setting up through an API are less likely going to be able to be monetized
anyway.

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johns
Really great idea. Starting with the API is smart. I hope you build it out and
let me create an account and manage my tasks and check out logs, etc.

~~~
dannyr
johns,

Yeah. Task Management Panel will be added in the future.

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euroclydon
Paid Version: Launch Web requests based on phone calls. Use Twilio for the
telephony and use your json results to make it more interactive.

~~~
jmonegro
Why wouldn't devs use Twilio directly?

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skorgu
I literally _just_ implemented a slightly beefier version of this for a
project I'm working on so obviously there's a need. There's a python
implementation (dateutil) of the icalendar rrule format which handles nearly
arbitrarily complicated repeating schemes with a decent API that you might
want to look at.

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Vindexus
Seems pretty cool actually. I'd break up the page and add some navigation. I'd
recommend the jQuery UI Tabs plugin for this just because it's so fast. You
could have a Home tab, FAQ tab, and Examples tab, perhaps?

Do you have a business model or is this just a resume bullet point?

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csomar
I would prefer to have a panel, where I can access and manage my tasks. If you
want to add the "delete" feature, you'll need accounts . Then a management
panel will be very useful.

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nailer
Minor note: cron is lowercase. If you're advertising to cron users, they might
not trust something that misspells what it's supposed to replace.

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justliving
a couple of thoughts regarding your app:

* unfortunately, the html does not render correctly in my chrome browser, e.g the first url on the left overlaps with the right column.

* depending on what you d like to do with it, you might want to consider to revamp a bit the UI?

* what's your intention with this service? Is it a side project or do you plan to commercialize it?

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m0th87
FWIW, it renders fine for me on Chrome unless I make the window quite small

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charlesdm
I like the idea of it, but you should really document this more. It's just all
on one page now, and that makes it hard to read imo.

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vorador
How does it work, and what is the point of such a webservice (your page gives
no information concerning both) ?

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adatta02
example use case I'd imagine would be something like "I want to send burst
emails every 20 minutes from my shared host which doesn't let me run cron
jobs. So I'll write a PHP script to send the emails and runmelater to ping the
script every 20 minutes"

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sandGorgon
hmm.. quite interesting. I wonder which scheduler did they use - cron based or
roll-your-own using Erlang, Scala or something

~~~
piotrSikora
He's using Task Queue service on Google App Engine
(<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/>).

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dnsworks
Last year I was spending time searching for a CRON interface that could be
subscribed to by iCal. I thought that it would be useful as a real-time
correlation tool, allowing a a NOC to a calendar on a large screen and quickly
gleam if a recent resource spike might be related to a cron entry (and which
one). This might help with that.

