Vinu Thomas has posted a tip for WordPress users working with scheduled posts and the "Missing Status" status that's caused by a bug in WordPress.

Ever since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.9, I've been having a problem in the scheduled posts in Wordpress. Everytime I set a post to be scheduled in the future, it used to miss the scheduled time and never get posted. When I checked the status of these posts in the posts admin area, each of these posts had the status "Missed Schedule" next to them.

To correct the issue, you need to make a change to the cron.php script for your installation (in wp-includes) to change the default timeout by quite a bit to ensure that the remote call has plenty of time to finish. It seems its related to the version of PHP's curl extension that's compiled into the web server installation.