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Your personal hosted FriendFeed clone: SweetCron – the automated lifestream blog software

Aug 28, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (76) 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.

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Tags: blog, clone, download, friendfeed, lifestream, software, sweetcron, tumblelog