Your personal hosted FriendFeed clone: SweetCron – the automated lifestream blog software
Aug 28, 2008 by Mircea Goia New Releases
I’m sure that many early technology adopters already found out about FriendFeed, the lifestream aggregator. What this does it merges your RSS feeds into one feed. And I’m giving you an example: let’s say you have an account on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon Whislits or even your personal blog…you can aggregate all the RSS of all these services into one and then share with people. There are other services like that but FriendFeed is the most known. All these services are hosted services which means you don’t 100% own it (you have to open an account and add the stuff).
Now you can have your very own personal service like that (well, almost – exception: merging the feeds)! This was made possible by Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestream aggregator which now is in public beta. The developer is YongFook, a web producer from Tokyo, Japan (his website is an example of a Sweetcron installation).
I registered to their site in order to download the software (you will be confused a bit because you don’t get to download the software right away, they will send it by email the link to download).
I’ll spare you of registering your email with them so you can start experimenting right away.
Here is the direct link to the download site: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/downloads/list
And here is the direct link to their documentation: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/wiki/Installation
Requirements
* A web server with at least PHP5 and MySQL4.1
* A web server with mod_rewrite installed
* Some rss feeds of your activity across the web
Installation (administration video below)
Download the ZIP file and unzip it. Now you have the root and two directories: “public” and “system” (and “index.php“, “.htaccess“, “favicon.ico” and “license.txt“).
To configure Sweetcron lifestream aggregator before uploading do this:
- 1. In “system/application/config/” rename “config-sample.php” to “config.php”
2. Open “config.php” in a text editor (Notepad, Editplus, Notepad++, Ultraedit would do it) and replace “http://www.your-site.com/” with your full site URL, including trailing slash.
3. In “system/application/config/” rename “database-sample.php” to “database.php“.
4. Open “database.php” in a text editor and fill in the username, password and database.
Upload the files by FTP to your web server account (you have two choices: to install it on your account’s root or in a sub-folder).
For an easy upload I recommend to use Filezilla FTP program.
You have to create a database to hold your data. Many hosting companies offers this options from their control panel (usually named “MySQL Databases“. Go there and create a new database. Then create a new user (don’t forget the username and the password). Then attach that user the the newly created database. That’s it…with this part.
An important step is not to miss the “.htaccess” file! It contains the code for the “mod_rewrite” engine used by the software in creating search engine friendly URLs.
If you don’t see that file in the root of Sweetcron then you need to create it (some operating system hides this type of file – the file doesn’t have any extension).
This is how it looks:
- ——————–
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
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I chose to install it in a sub-folder called “/sweetcron” (like “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/“)
For this you need to have two modifications in two files:
- – in “config.php” make sure the “base_url” variable is the full URL path to your Sweetcron install, i.e. including subfolder (like “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/” – don’t forget the trailing slash!)
- in “.htaccess” file found in the root of Sweetcron and change “RewriteBase /” to “RewriteBase /your_subfolder” (like “RewriteBase /sweetcron” in my case)
Re-upload these files again and replace those from your server.
Note: if you uploaded Sweetcron in your website’s root then you don’t need to do the modifications above
The real installation now begins. Go to “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron/” (or “http://www.your-site.com/” if you uploaded in the root) and you will see the message: “Whoo Hoo! Almost there – now just run the install script.”
Click on the link.
You have a form where you have to enter your details: Lifestream Title, Login Username and Email Address
Hit Install button (don’t pray 
…it will be all right). You will get the success message and you will have your username and the automatically generated password.
Log in. Now you see the first page called the Dashboard and you have a very friendly message “You have no items :/“…so it’s time to add some feeds here.
Go to Feeds tab from the top menu and then click Add Feed.
Now we have some feeds here…
Go to “http://www.your-site.com/sweetcron” (or “http://www.your-site.com/“) and see the result.
Note: by default, the updating is done once at 30 minutes (called “pseudo-cron” – no configuration needed). The software has the posibility also to configure manually the updating (called “true-cron” – you may need to talk to your hosting company about this). You can see those options if you click on the Options tab.
See the description below:
- ————————-
What is the difference between Pseudo Cron and True Cron?
A cron job is simply a computer task that is fired off at a set interval. In the world of Sweetcron this refers to your item imports – and this can either happen through Pseudo Cron or True Cron. The options panel provides a switch between both. Here is a brief description:Pseudo Cron – zero configuration. The only disadvantage is that once every 30 minutes, one visitor to your website may experience a slow load time as they will have triggered the automatic import. True Cron – you will need to set up a manual cron job.
The advantage is that updates happen without any user ever knowing (i.e. no slowdowns). The other advantage is that you can control how frequently Sweetcron imports new items (Pseudo Cron only imports once every 30 mins). To set up a true cron you can either do it through your web host control panel or through a 3rd party service such as http://www.webcron.org
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If you don’t want to let certain items to be shown on your page you can go to Items tab and Unpublish or Delete from there (you can also Edit if you want to).
Sweetcron has a rudimentary blog function and you can access it on Write tab. What you write there will show up in the stream on your site.
People have the possibility to leave comments on your stream but you have to install a third-party service like Disqus. If you want a contact page then you need to install again a third-party service: Wufoo
If you can hack code then you can program these yourself.
Sweetcron comes with two default themes
- Boxy but good (I prefer it)
- Sandbox
In the future more themes might be designed and built by enthusiasts.
Note: Sweetcron doesn’t actually combine the feeds it brings in (like FriendFeed does). The feeds just follows one after another.
See a video showing how to work with the administration panel (explained by the developer himself)
Competition
SweetCron isn’t alone in this field. Has some good competition from standalone lifestreaming software or web services.
Here are some of the competitors (a better list is here).
Scripts:
- Amplifeeder
- Wodpress RSS stream
- Lifestream Plugin for Wordpress
- SimpleLife
- Movable Type Action Streams
- Actionstream
- PHP Script
- Noserub
Services:
- FriendFeed
- 30 Boxes
- Jaiku
- Socialthing!
- Tumblr
- Mugshot
- Iminta
Conclusion
Sweetcron does its job. No fancy things, not to hard to install and configurate. Simple and effective.
Now, maybe in the future it will become more complicated because the developer might add new options. That depends on the feedback he gets.
But for now this is enough to just build a basic personal lifestream blog.
Centralize all your online activity on your personal website and give the URL to your friends. They might be glad no to go to 10,000 places to see what are your doing and not to have to register to Friendfeed to see the same thing.
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Mircea Goia was born in Romania and immigrated to US in 2005.
He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects and he shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing and online video.
His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.
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Tags: blog, clone, download, friendfeed, lifestream, software, sweetcron, tumblelog
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October 22nd, 2009 at 10:40 pm
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