Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software [Review]

For the past few months now, the social media world has been buzzing with anticipation about the launch of Sweetcron. Some of us have been waiting months for it to be released so that we could set up our Lifestream Blogs and be cool like Yongfook (the creator of Sweetcron) – who became known as the guy with the coolest & most wanted Lifestreaming Blog!

If you signed up to be notified of Sweetcron’s release, then you would have received an email yesterday inviting you to “get your hands dirty” (finally) with the Sweetcron software. After receiving my email though, I was a little discouraged because I’m not very familiar with installing software like this on websites plus, I don’t even know PHP (only HTML & CSS). So, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to install Sweetcron on my website but, shockingly I was wrong!

I was so caught up in all the talk & discussions that were going on yesterday in the Sweetcron FriendFeed room & the Sweetcron Google group that I decided to at least give it a try. Long story short, Yongfook’s installation guide was a breeze & I was able to install, set it up & get it going within 15 minutes & without any problems at all. I was very surprised since I did see a lot of pros complaining of installation issues in the Sweetcron FriendFeed room; I guess I’m more technically inclined than I thought. I even dug in deeper & was able to customize all of the PHP functions that needed tweaking & I must say, I’m very satisfied with the results.

So, what is Sweetcron & why is it the most talked about & biggest thing to hit the social media world this month? Well for one thing, once you get started it’s very addicting! I spent 1.5 days tweaking my site because, I wanted it to look unique & plus I was having fun with it. But, here are a few other things that make Sweetcron so “sweet”.

Automatic Imports
Since Sweetcron is a Lifestreaming software, it works in the same manner as FriendFeed & most other aggregators. “Uploaded a photo to Flickr? Bookmarked a new site? In a few minutes it will show up on your blog!” If you want to know when your site was last updated, you can see that in your admin dashboard.

Easily Customizable
Sweetcron can be tweaked to look just the way you want it to look. Plus, there are two themes included in the software. Also, since there was a new site launched called Sweetcron themes, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more themes around soon enough. If you’re good at making themes, you may even consider making & sharing some yourself.

Self Hosted
“Keep all your data safely on your own server and run Sweetcron via your own domain.” This is the part that I seemed to have missed (though I don’t know how) because I wasn’t aware that this was something I’d need to install. So, be aware that Sweetcron is not a site that you sign up & create an account for. You will need to install it on your own domain.

100% Free and Open Source
“Oh and did I mention Sweetcron is extensible, too? Write your own PHP classes and slot them right in!” I’m not too familiar with the open source thing but I know that you can write plugins for Sweetcron, which you can find out more about here. Also you can create styles for different types of imported items which you can read about here. So, you can have items imported from Digg look one way, items imported from Flickr can look another way, items imported from Rejaw can look another way, etc.

Public Beta
Aren’t you tired of all those private betas, most of which aren’t even worth the wait!? Well Sweetcron is in public beta, so head on over & join the fun; no wait required!

Ok so now I’m sure you’re wondering what you can do with Sweetcron, right? Well all the magic happens in your admin area.

Dashboard
This page shows the last 5 public items in your Lifestream. Plus you can see your Sweetcron stats & useful links. From here you can edit, unpublish & delete entries as well.

Write
Here can write actual posts to be displayed on your site. So, not everything has to be imported from feeds, you can write regular blog entries as well. The blog post content area supports the markdown method of shorthand markup.

Items
This page shows all of your Lifestream items. The number of items shown per page depends on the number of entries you’ve chosen to display on your site per page. You can edit, unpublish & delete entries here. You can also see all of the feeds that you are currently importing into your site & see all of the tags that you’re using on your site. Lastly, you can search through your items, making it easy to find a certain post or topic.

Feeds
Here you can see in more detail each feed that you’re importing into your site. More importantly, this is where you add & delete feeds.

Options
Lastly there’s the options tab. This is where you enter your site title, email, items per page, cron type & choose your theme.

Even after all this that I’ve mentioned, there’s still lots to know & a lot that you can do to your Sweetcron site. So if you decide to try it out, I definitely recommend you bookmark & utilize these links:

FriendFeed Room
Google Group
Google Code

Also be sure to stop by Yongfook’s site, he’s a really cool & friendly guy as well as a Web genius! Sweetcron is definitely something that I can see developing into a huge phenomenon. Plus, I can’t wait to see what other features get added (with upgrades) to this software; as of yesterday, we’ve already had 5 updates!

So, what do you think of Sweetcron so far? Do you have a Sweetcron site? If you do please post it in a comment, I’d love to stop by; I’m kind of addicted to seeing how unique everyone’s site is! Feel free to stop by mine (still under construction) as well here.

Technorati Tags: sweetcron, lifestream, blog, software, yongfook, rss feeds, feed import, micro-blog