How to get rid of URL ?doing_wp_cron=xxxxxxxx

So I noticed a few times on my blog that I was getting a URL return of https://www.davidhill.co/?doing_wp_cron=1352938402

While this doesn’t cause a problem, it doesn’t look professional, so I wondered what it was, and why was it appearing.  After some digging, I found a link to this page on the Wordpress support forums http://wordpress.org/support/topic/doing_wp_cron. It turns out that I enabled a feature as a work around for my scheduled backups on the recommendation of the plugin creator, and this was the consequence. What it doesn’t tell you is how to fix this problem. For me it is a really simple fix, as I host a Turnkey Linux WordPress appliance in a Virtacore vCloud, I simply enabled loopbacks on my host. For anyone who doesn’t understand the “WordPress” term “Loopback” it is the URL of your site being able to “loopback” locally on itself. My host configuration did not have this configured.

A simple way of fixing this is to edit the /etc/hosts file, and simply add the FQDN of your site in one of the lines:


127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 www.virtual-blog.com
127.0.1.1 wordpress

You can test if this works by running command wget [URL of site]

root@wordpress ~# wget www.virtual-blog.com
--2012-11-20 00:50:25-- https://www.davidhill.co/
Resolving www.virtual-blog.com... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to www.virtual-blog.com|127.0.0.1|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: `index.html.1'

2012-11-20 00:50:26 (3.42 MB/s) - `index.html.1' saved [64481]