Living with Sweetcron

January 6 2009, 11:09am

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:

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?