Posts Tagged ‘sweetcron’

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Sweetcron is the latest new shiny toy in self-hosted lifestreaming. Sweetcrons main selling point is the ability to store your lifestreaming data on your own server,and on your own domain. There was much awaited anticipation of this application. It has garnered lots of publicity for the past few months. I finally installed Sweetcron and took it for a test drive..

I was extremely unimpressed. The hype sold me, but that’s about the only thing that I can say will sell me about this application, or at least in its current stages.

Most of us who attempt to set up self-hosted lifestreams must be comfortable with php, and for the most part, rely on plugins in conjuncture with some type of blogging platform, usually wordpress. While I expected Sweetcron to be so much more, it’s pretty much a stripped down wordpress blog with tags and the capability of importing rss. In it’s current state it does not look very secure. The php scripts running it, look off the shelf and possibly highly exploitable.

It’s in pretty rough shape: nowhere near a 1.0 release. The architecture and design decisions come off as amateurish as well. I wouldn’t trust it with my data. - Mark Trapp

I agree with Mark Trapp’s comment quoted above, from this FriendFeed thread. I also would be very cautious of the data you input into Sweetcron at its present stages. This application needs some serious development. It could be your own personal FriendFeed, without the friends, but it’s simply not.

What Sweetcron does have going for them is the fact it’s open source and easily customizable. At least now, others can improve on this application where Sweetcron seems to have failed.

Under the hood, it runs on php and mysql. Setting it up was relatively easy. Create your database, modify your php files and it’s installed.  The control panel is so bare-bones it could not be any more basic.

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The dashboard is minimal. It’s pretty self explanatory from the screen shot. You can do 3 things here.

1. Write: Post directly to your lifestream
2. View Items: Delete, edit, unpublish/publish.
3. Feeds: Add or delete rss feeds.

You can also post directly to your lifestream. I guess this could be useful if you were extremely bored. This is what Twitter is for. This sort of defeats the purpose since you more then likely would have tweets imported in via rss.

This is your options page, or should I say lack of options page.

Last but not least, Smartcron has a link for comments, but failed to implement a commenting system. It’s great they suggest using Disqus for comments, but after all this application is built on mysql and php! Commenting could have been easily implemented.

At this stage in the game, there is nothing to see here folks. My advice is if your looking for a service like this, set up a self-hosted wordpress blog, and customize it.