My website runs on a system called Sweetcron - an open source lifestreaming app. These are my early thoughts on setting it up, using it and what it can do.

If you're into social media mashups, I think you'll like it, but you're going to need to know some code.

Sweetcron is new PHP software created by the Sweetcron-Meister Yong Fook which pulls in items from social media data feeds around the web onto your own hosted site.

At the moment, I've got feeds from a number of services running into the site, including:

• Photos I add to Flickr
• News items I share from RSS feeds I read within Google Reader
• Links that I bookmark in Delicious
• Web pages I Digg via Digg.com
• Videos I upload or favourite on YouTube
• Tracks I love on Last.fm
• Songs I play on Blip.fm
• And last, but not least, blog posts I write myself via Sweetcron itself

Why use Sweetcron?

Sweetcron certainly isn't for everyone, but the system appealed to me for a few reasons:

• It's different... and I'm just like that, I guess


• I'm as interested in sharing other people's content as I am in my own, and Sweetcron treats a link to someone elses content as important as my own writings


• I'm not a prolific writer and hate the feeling many bloggers have that they have to write something, but I don't want my site to sit there without updates for days on end while I procrastinate about blogging (nor force myself to write when I've nothing important to say, or someone else is saying it better)


• I want to build a collection of useful, interesting stuff that I can go back to, and others can access if they find my tastes interesting


• I like the concept of Lifestreaming - Friendfeed is an awesome social app for doing this, but it's just way too complicated for someone like my mum to get her head around. I wanted a nice simple way of displaying my stuff that anyone could appreciate


• It was a challenge to hack around in the code and customise the system for my own purposes

Tweakage

So I installed the system, added some feeds and had a tinker. I changed the design a bit, added a tab for each of the main feeds I use to the top (so you could look at, for example, just my bookmarks, or photos, or videos etc). I added a label to every item, so the user knows what it is - a blog, a link, a video or a photo. And I removed Twitter from my main activity stream - more on that later.

I also set up an RSS feed for just my blog posts as well as the default feed for all items, as the default feed was initially just way too noisy to be useful (especially when Tweets were included).

I got loads of help from the others in the Sweetcron Google code group and even got some requests from some people to give them the code for the theme I'd been developing, so I released the Boxdaddy theme, which to my surprise, lots of others have used and customised for their own purposes.

I've continued to tweak the functionality of the site, and I've enjoyed getting stuck into the code and creating something unique. I'd love to get comments/feedback on the site, and the next thing I want to look at is the design - I'm no graphic designer and I'm well aware that the site looks a bit bland, so if anyone wants to give me some suggestions, I'm all ears!

So what's it like using Sweetcron?

There's an interesting shift in thinking that takes place when your actions on Social Media sites result in a new post on your website. It's different from aggregating your content on Friendfeed.

When bookmarking a page, for example, on Friendfeed it just drops into the endless datastreams - some people notice it, most don't, but it really doesn't matter in the end - Friendfeed is a kind of black hole for web content.

When the same action creates a new item on your site, however, it takes on a greater personal significance and this has certainly made me think about the usefulness and importance of what I'm sharing a lot more.

Another thing that's happened is that I tend to think about the balance of services that I'm using more. When you look at your own site and see 10 google reader shares in a row it just doesn't look so good, so it kinda prompts you to mix up the services you're using a bit. For example, if there haven't been any photos for a while it'll prompt me to go back to my camera and get something new onto Flickr.

For Blog writing, Sweetcron doesn't have much of a Content Management system - you just get to add the title, content and tags - that's it. There's no image insert, no B, I, U buttons... no "Kitchen Sink" of the kind you find in Wordpress, so everything has to be hand coded. It's something that's definitely a key issue to improve the system if it's to be more useful to the average user, but I'm happy working in HTML, so I'm not too bothered by it, but it does make writing slower, and I'd like to see a decent CMS integrated soon.

My thoughts on Sweetcron

I really like the concept of a self hosted lifestreaming website and I'll be keeping my eyes open for some of the other projects coming online - for example Kakuteru (A Ruby on Rails solution).

I've got a few thoughts I want to push out there to see if they resonate with anyone else...

• It's not for everyone. Don't try Sweetcron if you're not comfortable digging into the PHP and CSS code on your site - it's not a simple "install and go" solution - you'll need to customise it. (Although, of course, if you need someone to customise it for you, I'm open to offers! - Get in touch!)


• Sweetcron could really do with a back end CMS for blog posts - perhaps someone will be able to point me in the direction of an easily integrateable PHP CMS, or hopefully, Yong Fook will incorporate it into his next release


• Sweetcron doesn't discern any hierarchy of information - each item is treated as an equal, so it helps to create other ways of highlighting your more important content. For example, I've added a 'Recent Blog Posts' scrolling textbox to my sidebar to highlight my own writing.


• Related to this, Twitter is a problematic service to incorporate in your main Sweetcron activity feed. If it's in there, your site will tend to be a flood of Tweets, or you may find yourself limiting your use of Twitter so as to avoid flooding your website with tweets (I did this at first). This can seriously limit the value you can get out of Twitter, which is a free flowing conversational medium. I wanted to be able to use Twitter as and when I wanted, so eventually, I just pulled the Twitter feed out of my main site and put the stream into my Sidebar. This works way better for me.


• UPDATE: I've just added a blog container at the top of the home page instead - nod to the teh blog ar (not) dead theme


• I'm quite interested in the possibilities that Sweetcron offers for creating an group or event website - it could be really useful for a project involving a number of different people focussing on a particular topic, or event. I'd quite like to get an opportunity to work with the system to try that out

All in all, I love what Sweetcron enables me to do with my own site, which is to just get on with reading, sharing and creating content on social media sites, knowing that my website will be updated with the content I choose, and it doesn't need any heavy curating by me.

Of course, it could do with some improvements - I think a back end CMS for blog writing and media uploading is probably the most important, and there are a bunch of issues with particular feed types - so configuring Sweetcron is not a straightforward process - but you can get help from an active community on the Google Code Group and I think the end result is very elegant and user friendly.

So what do you think? Like my site? Useful idea or should I just junk it and get on the Wordpress express train like everyone else?

Here’s an article I wrote for the Birmingham Post, published on page 5 today: How would you feel if everything you tried to access on the internet were filtered for “unacceptable content” by government censors? That’s a possibility Andy Burnham, secretary of state for culture has proposed this week. He’s concerned about the fact that he can’t leave his kids for two hours alone on the home computer without fear that they will be exposed to inappropriate content. The problem is that the internet doesn’t take into account the user’s age when they access it and doesn’t have a 9pm watershed. How can a dad trust that if he lets his ten-year-old daughter use the internet for a while unsupervised that she won’t accidentally click on something that’s not meant for her, be exposed to something frightening, violent or sexually explicit and suffer nightmares for weeks afterwards? Or even, how can he trust that if he gives his 14-year-old son a free email account that he won’t be inundated with sexually explicit spam email? The answer is that parents and guardians of kids just can’t. There is no internet-wide, internationally agreed method for parents to filter out what is, and isn’t, appropriate (in their view) for their kids. So Mr Burnham commissioned an excellent report into these issues by clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron who neatly summarises the problem: “Many parents seem to believe that when their child is online it is similar to them watching television … in fact it is more like opening the front door and letting your child go outside to play, unsupervised.” So what’s to be done? Mr Burnham is currently considering a couple of options that have set bloggers raging: How about websites having cinema-style age ratings like they do for films? Or how about forcing the internet service providers, like BT and Virgin Media, to filter out sites that host ‘inappropriate’ content? Neither of these ideas will work, and here’s why: There are currently one trillion web addresses in Google’s index of the web. But some estimate that the size of the ‘invisible web’ – the password protected pages, the things that aren’t linked to anywhere – is about ten times that size, so let’s estimate that there are 100 trillion web addresses out there (strictly, it’s infinite but that’s another story). If you or I were to attempt to go through each of these sites by hand and decide whether they are appropriate or inappropriate for our kids, one page every second, it would take over 30 million years! Or put another way, you could have 30 million people employed to do the job. That’s just the web. People often conflate the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’, but there are a huge number of services that use the internet that don’t appear as ‘web sites’. A big one, that’s hugely popular with kids is MSN – it’s like text messaging on your phone, but quicker, more fun and free. Are we going to have some kind of system monitoring every message that gets sent for ‘inappropriate content’ too? Obviously this is an impossible task to be done by hand, so the government would need some sophisticated software to do it. The trouble is that computers find it very difficult to analyse a piece of text or an image and decide if it’s ‘bad’ or ‘good’ depending on some criteria. The web is very different to the world of film (or games). Once you’ve released your film, that’s it – it’s done and can be quite easily given an age rating. But websites change from day to day or are even so dynamic that pages don’t exist until requested. One minute a site could just have pictures of kittens on it, the next someone could upload some legal, but adult content. How would you rate a photo-sharing site like Flickr where around 5million images are uploaded every day, a handful of which might be ‘inappropriate’? Over 18 only? That would make hundreds of thousands of blog posts suddenly image-free for the filtered user because bloggers tend to use Flickr images to illustrate their points. And how are we to legislate for websites that are produced or hosted outside the UK? And furthermore, who decides what content should or should not be permissible to be viewed? Earlier this year Birmingham City Council’s internet filter ‘Bluecoat’ amusingly barred employees from accessing prominent atheist Richard Dawkins’s blog because it contained “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism” [since writing this it's been brought to my attention that this is not actually the case, although plenty of websites were filtered], and in fact my own blog was blocked to council employees for some reason too. [this is definitely the case, but my blog is no longer blocked] If we were to roll out something along the lines of what the Australian government is attempting this year, where every internet connection in the country is filtered with a system like this, we would see more of these kinds of ‘false positives’ occurring. And a flurry of lawsuits from legitimate but banned website owners would follow. But surely it is ultimately the responsibility of the parent to help their kids navigate the dangers of the online world? The government putting out the message that they’ve got the kids protected with an electronic system will just mean more kids will be left in front of computers for hours at a time, and if you’ve ever done any work with young people you know just how easy they find it to get around any filtering system. What alarmed me the most, though is this comment from the interview with Mr Burnham in one newspaper: “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.” I disagree entirely. Once something is on the internet it is potentially always accessible, because it can be copied by anyone. Wish-thinking that this is not the case does not help. If you take some content down from one site, it will just reappear elsewhere. Put simply, rating websites and filtering internet connections are unworkable ideas, and the Byron review draws the same conclusions, so it is confusing to see them even being discussed. Here’s an alternative suggestion. One of Mr Burnham’s predecessors made free museum access for all a reality. So how about something of similar ambition for the web? This year, the UK e-commerce market grew a whopping 28 per cent and is set to continue growing in 2009. The digital media industry could prove to be a big success story in a time of recession. How about free WI-FI access in every UK city? Or upgrading our national broadband network to the level that Korea enjoys? Either of these ideas would be by far a more constructive project and lead to marked benefits to the UK digital economy and are precisely the kind of ambitious projects that only Mr Burnham is positioned to undertake. In the mean-time the solution to the problem of kids and the internet is simple. Parents need to get familiar with the technology themselves so they can help their kids navigate the digital world. That’s where the government can help – by educating parents and breaking down the generational digital divide. But some quick advice to parents. You should make sure the computer is in the living room so you can see the screen (not in the child’s room) and you should not leave your kids browsing the web unsupervised. You could also install something like NetNanny for younger kids, try out KidZui for kid-friendly content and install the Glubble kid-safe browser. None of which requires any government spending.

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I've been doing some work on this site recently and have done a lot on my about page in particular.

Sweetcron is an interesting platform, as it allows you to download the (open source) code and host your own site on your own domain and server, a bit like Wordpress.org.

The difference is that as well as having a blog engine, Sweetcron pulls feeds in from, well... anywhere - I use it to pull in my content from social media sites I use.

I'll probably write a bit more about Sweetcron, as I think it can be a really useful platform for creating websites for individuals, events and brands.

I've also done a lot of work on my about page. This is an interesting exercise in working out some issues about direction, identity, branding and digital presence.

There's a danger with the rapidly developing web that pre early web stuff can get lost, so I've compiled a list of my 'greatest hits' - things I've achieved in my life that I proud of.

Wherever possible, I've I've put in a relevant link - have an explore - there's some interesting stuff in there.

Lucy Dickenson from the SAFE Foundation gets to grips with their new website.