Nice, I hear you on the risks of depending on 3rd-party libraries where you can't get your changes merged. It's nice to be able to roll your own in that case.

On the cron case, what are your thoughts on the email notifications? In what ways are the useful or useless? I'm not an expert in this stuff.

And I really like the look of uback. I have the kind of sense (and pride) that maybe this thread I posted is going to be the place where some people (who were maybe previously laboring on something in obscurity) first posted it to the world, or mentioned about it. Or maybe were even encouraged by this Ask post, or seeing other people post work, to post their own work. I'd love it if that were the case, if this post of mine was something that contributed to people posting their work that went on to become something good. :) Not trying to give you pressure, but uback could be that. :) It's pretty fresh