DIGI AUTO LINKS | SERVER MELTDOWN!

Last week, I started playing with the excellent DIGI AUTO LINKS (DAL) wordpress plugin.
It's an all-singing, all-dancing backlink-building system, which uses Wordpress Pingbacks.

I had it installed on 4 sites, and I'd noticed that things were running slowly, with the occasional "Internal System Error" thrown in for good measure.

So I contacted the excellent support people at Unlimited Web Hosting to see what was going on.. Unusually, they wanted to RING ME.. unheard of!
I was tied up with other things for several hours, so when I finally got free, I checked my sites, and found that THREE had been suspended, (for server-hogging, I found out later..)

I worked out that FEEDWORDPRESS (FWP) was creating batches of posts that DAL was trying to process instantly, resulting in server meltdown.

We fixed the problem by pausing the DAL cron jobs, bringing the sites back up one at a time, and deactivating the DAL plugins. Normal servive resumed.

CONCLUSION: DAL doesn't work for me.
It's an excellent product, and would work fine on a normal blog, where there is a NORMAL level of posts. THAT doesn't describe my sites..

DIGI AUTO LINKS (DAL)

UNLIMITED WEB HOSTING

SETTING UP CRON JOBS IN PLESK

My web hosts Unlimited Web Hosting use the PLESK system rather than CPANEL.
There's no direct access to the Unix Shell, so you can't directly use Unix CRON commands.

The solution is in PLESK itself. Select Domains, then the domain you want to add a job to. Now find "Scheduled Jobs", and select a "System User" - probably the FTP user.
Click "Add Scheduled Job".
In "Minutes", add the Minutes you want the job to run, eg "15,30,45,0" to run every 15 minutes.
In "Hours", add the number(s) of the hours you want the job to run, eg "4,8,12,16,20", or "*" for ALL hours.
Same applies for the "Day" and "Week" fields.

So, for example, if you want to run a task twice an hour, every hour, every day, use the following:
Put "00,30" in the Minutes field, and put "*" in all the other fields. Simple, but not immediately obvious.

I now have proper CRON jobs running my feedwordpress systems, and also "DIGI AUTO LINKS". I've timed them to minimise cpu use..


Minutes:

Digi Auto Links Plugin

I've taken the plunge and actually BOUGHT a plugin.
It's called DIGI AUTO LINKS, and what it does is use wordpress's pingback system to build links between my posts and related posts on other websites.
It's automated, and runs by a cron job.
It has the useful side-effect of adding loads of relevant tags to my posts, as well..

Right Now, you can get this great plugin for 66% discount, but I'm not sure for how long.. DIGI AUTO LINKS - DISCOUNT PRICE

So don't complain if you've already missed the discount..