Mou

Lifecasting with Sweetcron

sweetcron logoI stumbled across a fancy little open source app last week called Sweetcron (hat tip to Dave), which turns your online presence into a “lifecast”. The premise is simple – you give it an RSS feed, and it processes it and stores the items from the feed. Add it several feeds, and it works sort of like a timeline of the things you do on various websites – utlimately pretty pointless, but very cool to look at.

I’ve put my activity list up at http://life.mou.me.uk.

In true geek fashion I’ve written my own theme (any excuse for an hour on photoshop), although I’ve still got a bit of tweaking to go. And I’ve written a couple of plugins – one to add the artists picture onto the lastfm RSS feed and another to grab my most recently played Xbox games – seeing as Xbox don’t provide feeds I had to grab my gamertag using curl and use regex to grab the 5 games, then cross check them with my database to see if they’ve been seen before, and if not then assume they’re new, add them, then output the most recent 10 as an RSS feed. Phew! As a side note, its crazy that Microsoft don’t offer an official API for grabbing Xbox profile info – or even RSS feeds – I thought they were all about developers, developers, developers?? 😛


7 Responses to “Lifecasting with Sweetcron”

  1. Hey nice one. I’m fiddling with SweetCron a lot at the moment. Tweak here tweak there.

    Give us a peep at your last.fm album cover grabber thingy plugin then 🙂

  2. Sweetcron is a handy little application, though still not found the time to config it yet on my server, weekends aren’t just long enough!

  3. Hi, i have now got my sweetcron running 🙂 http://life.8bit-online.co.uk/. But i havent got round to sorting out and creating a custom theme, are you going to be releasing your custom theme, its very nice and well put together!

    • mou

      Hi Andy – nice one! Looking good!

      I went a little OCD over Sweetcron for about a week – I’m 95% of the way to finishing a last.fm plugin, an xbox “recently played games” plugin and that theme I’m using. But as with everything, when you start 3 things at once none of them get finished 😉

      But yeah, I do plan on releasing a version of my theme when I’m convinced its working like it should be! The graphics are all custom made though and I’ve only made one for the services I use, so I don’t know how expandable it’ll be. I’ll have to have a think about how I’m going to do it.

      Either way, I’ll blog about it when I do. 🙂

    • mou

      Oh, and thanks for the compliment! Like I said, any excuse for a couple of hours on photoshop 😉

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