Create a Self-hosted Lifestream with Sweetcron

One of the current problems with the proliferation of social networks and other online services is the difficulty people have compiling (or aggregating) an abundance of personal content from all over the internet. Many are posting photos to Flickr or Picasa, videos to YouTube or Vimeo, status updates to Facebook or Twitter and a variety of other items to sites web-wide. The solution has become something called “lifestreaming”, which is another in the countless series of incomprehensible buzzwords that simply means putting all your stuff on one page that is organized chronologically. See my personal lifestream for clarity.

The fact is, most of these lifestream solutions are in their infancy and require creating another account. FriendFeed is among the best providers of this type and while we use and love it, it is often too complicated for non-techies. It has also become primarily a vehicle for carrying on conversations about the items posted, so…if you’re not interested in participating, you’re really not utilizing many of its most powerful features.

What can one do instead? Well, we have decided to install a piece of software called Sweetcron on our own webhost, so we can archive the information within our own database, make it searchable and display it on a custom domain. I know, that’s even more complicated than FriendFeed, but for us – along with many others – we think it’s the best solution.

Sweetcron is beautifully simple. It provides an easy to use admin area that features a minimal blogging interface, a manager for your social network feeds (which it calls items) and a couple of other options to customize your install. It is not a full-featured content management system, but it does what is advertisied very well. I think it will be a refreshing depature for anyone using one of the more blog-centric systems or custom content management solutions.

There are a couple of excellent resources for installing Sweetcron if you want to try it. The software developer maintains a Google Code page with installation instuctions and a few other sites have also developed tutorials for the software. We could potentially help you set up one of these streams too if you just let us know what you need. I have done it a couple of times now and feel pretty comfortable working my way through an install, theme selection and customization.