Tag: Social Networking

SweetCron – Standalone Lifestream Aggregator

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.

Complex Life WordPress Plugin

Complex Life is a plugin for WordPress designed to import information from social networking and other web applications and then output a page that integrates in one place all of the things you’re doing online.

Take a look, for example, at my lifestream which could be prettier, but you’ll get the basic idea. Complex Life is importing my Facebook feed and my Google Reader shared feed (which includes the title and links to comments I’ve made on the web as well as links to my latest Spore creations — well my kids’ latest creations since they hijacked it after seeing all that Spore goodness). You could also import your Twitter updates and information from other sites as well as any site that offers plain old RSS feeds of your data.

Very nice. One improvement I’d like to see is the ability to store the data in the WordPress database. At the moment the plugin is retrieving each feed, parsing it and then caching it for about an hour and a half, at which point it goes out and retrieves the feed again. I’d like to store that data in MySQL which could add some interesting options.