Twenty Four is a daily Lifestream

• February 10 2010, 1:04pm
  tagged as: 24 sweetcron toolbox

Unfortunately Sweetcron has been officially abandoned by its author. Hence documentation is poor and scattered. I will list the main resources I found: tutorials, screencasts, tips and whatever was helpful in developing my own Sweetcron lifestream. I hope this will help you as well, helping beginners to start and hopefully interesting "power users" as well. Feedback is welcome, please use comments below.

Table of contents: Quick start | How to & tutorial | Customization & themes | Numbers & stats

Quick start

“ Sweetcron is an open source lifestreaming blog software created by Jon "Yongfook" Cockle based on the CodeIgniter framework. It was originally released on 3 September 2008 and the latest version following on 22 September. Sweetcron is similar to other web applications such as Tumblr and Friendfeed, but users are able to host their own lifestream on their own server and customize it in any way they want with the Sweetcron API...”
- Sweetcron definition on Wikipedia

1. The official project page on Google code
2. "The Blog is Dead" Yong Fook slide about sweetcron
3. An introduction post by ReadWriteWeb

How to, tutorial & resources

The best way to learn how to work with Sweetcron is to install it; here are the official guide and other useful information:

4. The installation guide
5. Building a Custom Lifestream Website with Sweetcron - tutorial by Chris Coyier
6. How to install SweetCron on local server - Carbon Graffiti tutorial
7. Screencast: Making a Lifestream with Sweetcron - by Alex Denning on Vimeo

A very important role is played by Sweetcron plugin and fortunately many are included in the official download. Below is a list of the main plugins developed by users:

8. The plugin documentation
9. ffffound plugin for Sweetcron by omarrr.net
10. Brightkite maps with Sweetcron - a plugin by CiscoMonkey dot net
11. Last.fm for sweetcron by Chris Chrisostomou
12. Friendfeed plugin for sweetcron by Mitch McKenna

These however are some useful resources and public groups on Sweetcron

13. Google group
14. Friendfeed group
15. Flickr group
16. sweetcron² - "Aggregating content from around the web about lifestream software- sweetcron."
17. Sweetcron Bookmarklet (unofficial) - (and, I must admit, not tested)

Customization, free themes & gallery

Develop from scratch (or customize) a Sweetcron theme is relatively simple, here is where to start and how to proceed if we want something more:

18. Themes & API page
19. Adding tinyMCE WYSIWYG In Sweetcron Blog Editor by CodeGenius
20. Multiple User SweetCron Release - multiple user sweetcron source files by CodeGenius

Here are some free themes and galleries of projects based on Sweetcron

21. Plain Simple - "Plain Simple is a text-only theme for your SweetCron..."
22. UXCron - "UXCron is a grid based SweetCron theme..."
23. Social Cubes by Derek Punsalan
24. Sweetcron themes on I Love blog Design

Numbers and stats, a little rough

Just out of curiosity and without any scientific significance I will carry some numbers that I found in my research on Sweetcron: There are 502 results for the query "Sweetcron" on delicious.com, while Google is 170,000. The links that point to sweetcron.com are 628 on google. Looking on youtube there are 13 videos, 19 slides on Slideshare, 349 images on Flickr and an average of 12 tweets a day... more or less