title: Scheduling a regular event: Cron/Cron alternatives (including Celery)
body: <p>Something I've had interest in is regularly running a certain set of actions at regular time intervals. Obviously, this is a task for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron" rel="nofollow noreferrer">cron</a>, right?</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, the Internet seems to be in a bit of disagreement there.</p>
  
  <p>Let me elaborate a little about my setup. First, my development environment is in Windows, while my production environment is hosted on <a href="http://www.webfaction.com/why-webfaction/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Webfaction</a> (Linux). There is no real cron on Windows, right? Also, I use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_%28web_framework%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Django</a>! And what's suggested for Django?</p>
  
  <p><em><a href="http://ask.github.com/celery/getting-started/introduction.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Celery</a></em> of course! Unfortunately, setting up Celery has been more or less a literal nightmare for me - please see <em><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6244554">Error message 'No handlers could be found for logger “multiprocessing”' using Celery</a></em>. And this is only ONE of the problems I've had with Celery. Others include a socket error which it I'm the only one ever to have gotten the problem.</p>
  
  <p>Don't get me wrong, Celery seems REALLY cool. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of support, and some odd limitations built into its preferred backend, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RabbitMQ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">RabbitMQ</a>. Unfortunately, no matter how cool a program is, if it doesn't work, well, it doesn't work!</p>
  
  <p>That's where I hope all of you can come in. I'd like to know about cron or a cron-equivalent, which can be set up similarly (preferably identically) in both a Windows and a Linux environment.</p>
  
  <p>(I've been struggling with Celery for about two weeks now and unfortunately I think it's time to toss in the towel and give up on it, at least for now.)</p>