09-23-2008

Sweetcron, the Automated Lifestream

What it is.
Sweetcron is a self-hosted lifestreaming CMS that offers full control over what content gets imported, and how it looks on the live website for visitors. Anything that has an RSS feed has the ability to be consumed by Sweetcron, and each feed can visually customized as well. Created by Yongfook

Why its cool.
There are already some existing solutions,like Socialthing and FriendFeed that allow you to organize your lifestream, but Sweetcron is the first solution that you can host on your own server. And since the only requirement for a feed coming into Sweetcron is that it’s a RSS feed you can do all sorts of great things. For example, set up a lifestream dedicated to a Craigslist category and have up-to-date notifications. Scroll down for more examples.

Sweetcron is also 100% free and opensource, which means you can write your own php classes to extend its base functionality to your hearts delight.

There is also a young, growing theme community creating new visual themes for the various feeds out there, but also very simple to edit and create your own.

What could be better.
While there is a lot to love, and Sweetcron gives you a lot of freedom, you do have to pay a price for them. Setup is well documented but it is not a one-click install and does require you to tinker around with some database and php. I have also heard that the system has some issues with select feeds, but I have not experienced that myself.

Examples in the wild.

Full Site
Yongfook

Topical Themes
Sean Percival’s Hurricane Gustav Aggregator
Sean Percival’s TechCrunch50 Aggregator

Visual Themes
Custom Theme
Simple Theme
Box Theme
Plain Theme

*updated*

decided to add my own. its rough. but was set up in an hour.

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2 Comments to “Sweetcron, the Automated Lifestream”

nickmontgomery September 24th, 2008 at 11:03 am

So does sweetcron basically consolidate any applications, social sites, etc you’re involved with into your own personal stream? So if I set one up, and say I post photos to Flickr, then sweetcron will automatically show what I did?

Mickey Slater September 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am

Nick,

Yup that is a good summary and a good example of what it can do. As long as you can find an RSS feed of that stream, you can bring it into Sweetcron.

The information that is present in a RSS feed varies from service to service, so sometimes there is a little leg work required to get it displaying properly. But in your specific question flickr is a pretty popular service and is included in the ‘box’ theme.

here is an example of my flickr RSS feed
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=97118359@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

That help?

Mickey