Fixing Wordpress Scheduled Posts
Wordpress has a neat little feature that allows you to write a post and then schedule it to display at some point in the future. This seems good, but it invariably doesn't work on some server platforms and rather than publishing a post Wordpress just counts the amount of time passed since it was supposed to go live. The basic solution to this is to go into the post and click on publish, which can be a pain if you are taking a couple of days off from blogging and want to leave it running.
The problem lies with the functions that convert a scheduled post into a live post which are kept in the file wp-cron.php in the root Wordpress directory. For some reason the Wordpress developers decided to call the scheduling functions using the fsockopen() function available in PHP. This essentially opens a browser session to the wp-cron.php file, just as you would if you browsed to the location using your web browser.