Cron jobs are a lot simpler than people explain them to be. All you have to do is create one (most webserver's Cpanel's have an wizard) and point it at a url. There's no scripting or anything you have to do. Just point it at the url and tell it how often to access that url.
They do the same thing as if you were to go to "example.com/sample.php" and refresh the page every 5 minutes.
Most of the tutorials out there are to modify apache to do special things with cron jobs, but if you have a commercial web server (like hostgator or even 000webhost) you can configure it in the Cpanel.
You can also use services like setcronjob.com for free.
have we come to a conclusion on the best way to do this?