TL;DR

Publishing posts at 2 AM isn’t exactly efficient.

In ETOOBUSY automated publishing we took a look at busypub, a small program to automate the process so that I can prepare posts beforehand and let the system publish one per day.

Then, in Notifications for busypub, we went a little step ahead to auto-announce the publishing on Mastodon and Twitter. Which really frees me up from the publishing process, because that was the missing piece. Now, I only have to make sure that a post was properly published.

The initial busypub was programmed to publish at midnight, as soon as the new day becomes reality. As the time zone in the containers for Dokku defaults to UTC+0000, this means that - for me - the publishing process currently happens at 2 AM.

I don’t disillude myself about writing something interesting, but I can at least make sure that my notifications happen in line with my time zone. For this reason, as of commit 4c1ba2b, it’s possible to set the publishing time and a timezone with two additional environment variables:

• TIMEZONE: this allows controlling the timezone from within the process, although it would probably work just as well by setting TZ directly;
• PUBLISH_TIME: when posts should be published, defaults to 07:00:00. You can specify just the hour, hour and minutes, or up to the seconds; just separate them with colons.

I hope it will be useful in the future! Well… to me at least 🙄