downdb.net

A few weeks back, Adam Harvey posted on his blog about using Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming app.

I should state here that I *hate* the term “lifestreaming”, but can’t think of a better replacement. The idea, however, is pretty cool—have one site that pulls in the updates from all my other various public online activities.

While the idea of lifestreaming isn’t particularly new, I hadn’t really found a workable, non-annoying way of doing it. Sure, there’s the WordPress TwitterTools plugin that sucks a daily digest of my Twitter posts into this blog, but then there’s Flickr, and Delicious, and the stuff I share and comment on in Google Reader, and a bunch of other random sites. Apps like FriendFeed and the now AOL-owned SocialThing make various runs at the problem, but then you’re dependent upon those 3rd-party sites. If they go down, get bought, change their policies, etc., you and all the data you’ve added to them are at their mercy.

Sweetcron seems like a pretty cool solution. It’s a PHP app with a MySQL back-end, and aside from a few minor quirks, it’s pretty easy to get up and running on any LAMP-stack host. Themes are extremely limited, and there aren’t many bells and whistles, but the first issue can be solved with some CSS knowledge, and the second is more of a feature than a bug.

I’ve got a very bare-bones instance running at http://stream.downdb.net/. I’m using one of the pre-installed themes, so it’s pretty ugly right now, and most of the templates still have the filler text provided by the guy who wrote the code. I also need to figure out how to have it *not* pull in a ton of random tags from Google Reader. Still, it’s a nice little app, and I really like that it lets me keep using all the various external services, but pulls my data in to a single site that I own and control.