Question

I’m currently saving some Twitter data in MySQL. My host only lets me run cron jobs every hour, so to semi-simulate realtime results, I’ve copied the same file 6 times, and run one every 10 minutes (the host DOES let you control the hourly offset). This is stupid, I think.

Is there some mechanism I can learn about that would push the data my way? Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.

(I’ve steered myself away from just querying their server with each page view; I know enough to know that’s poor practice)

Answer 1

How about accessing a web page (which will in turn execute the program) hosted at the server by adding to cron at client side (home system):

/usr/bin/curl http://yourserver.com/twitter

Otherwise, you can run the following bash script every hour:

#!/bin/bash

for (( i = 0; i < 6; i += 1 )); do
    /usr/bin/curl 'http://yourserver.com/twitter'
    sleep 600
done