Warning: The proceeding post is a LOT of geek talk.


I use MovableType on this here site, which I find to be suitable for all my needs. One thing that I had been trying to accomplish was the publishing of scheduled entries. Sure, I could mark something as scheduled, but without a script running to tell it publish, nothing happens. This past week was my first attempt to get it to “happen”.
MovableType comes with a nifty little tool called “run-periodic-tasks”. It can be scheduled as a Cron job to look for entries to publish every hour or day or week or whatever. After I set up the task to run, I started getting error emails. The first ending up being due to the wrong file permissions, which is a fast fix. But the next was the most maddening error ever: Cannot Locate MT:TheSchwartz.pm. When I first saw it, I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or not. I have no idea why someone decided to name that file “The Schwartz” but it is indeed called that. I googled and googled and googled some more, trying to figure out how to get this blasted thing to find the Schwartz. The one thing that kept popping up was to change the relative paths in the file to the actual paths. Seemed simple enough, yes? So I tried writing the directory and subdirectory, tried with the url and without…nothing was working. And then…THEN.. I stumbled on the answer.

I logged into my site’s MT admin.

I went to System Overview.

I clicked on Tools –> System Information.

Right there there’s a line that says “Current working directory”.

THAT’S the path. I plugged in that ridiculously long string, and BAM! It’s finding The Schwartz.

Hopefully, that will help someone out and they don’t need to waste the same amount of time as I wasted.