I’ve been using a WordPress plugin to aggregate my comments, Facebook updates, etc. The other day, though, I read about the standalone open source SweetCron software that does the same thing only with a few extras.
Just like ComplexLife, after installing SweetCron you start giving it feeds of sites you post/contribute/update to, and then it regularly goes out and pulls down the feeds and aggregates them in a central area. Unlike ComplexLife, however, SweetCron writes each item to a database where you can edit and tag it. It also displays the entire text of the item and any graphics, whereas ComplexLife just provides the subject line and then a link to the item in question.
Overall, I was very impressed with SweetCron — check out my SweetCron lifestream if you’re curious what it looks like. Still in beta, but very stable and capable.
Cindi and I are putting a website for our coporate selves together and I’m looking very much to have it act as much a personal site as a “please give us money” site. (Well, we’ll see how that goes.) Was there a reason you stopped using the WordPress plugin? And how hard is it to integrate the database infor from SweetChron into WordPress’s content?
I really would kill for a Conversant-level of abstraction of “all content is the same, just displayed in different ways”.
@Mark Morgan: At the time i was using ComplexLife it was basically just sucking in feeds and re-displaying them — it wasn’t actually archiving or writing anything to a database. So, say 14 days later the stuff would scroll over into neverland.
The LifeStream plugin will apparently store everything in the same MYSQL database. You can see a pretty sweet looking example of it in use here.
As for Sweetcron, its pretty much standalone — doesn’t really integrate at all. In fact, most of the people who seem to be using it are doing so as a basic blogging tool, so rather than having your own URL resolve to a blog, etc., they’re having it resolve to their lifestream and then updating by posting to Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The one feature that Sweetcron has that I really like but doesn’t seem to be common in these things is the tagging. I really want to be able to search for all items posted on a specific feed, tagged with X and containing $Y.
And, of course, you’re absolutely right about Conversant. It would be much more elegant and useful for CMSes to treat data as generic and then display it based on how the user indicates. The idea of a CMS as a collection of messages that you then have multiple views on was killer.
OTOH, as far as I can tell, people who get that seem to be in the minority. People seem to prefer thinking about “Pages” and “Posts” and these sorts of categories that are predefined by the software that often have idiosyncratic and somewhat bizarre limitations.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the PODS CMS plugin for WordPress, but that takes a more Conversant like approach to data within WordPress.