You’ll have to forgive me for writing a short entry this afternoon– I’m much too eager to play around with my new Sweetcron installation to post at length! As promised by developer Yongfook, self-hosted lifestreaming service Sweetcron launched a public beta yesterday, opening its doors to throngs of aggregation enthusiasts. At the beginning of the month, I wrote about why I was excited for Sweetcron’s release, and I’m happy to say that my recent dabblings in the brand-new service have met my high expectations.
Why install Sweetcron?
As a web-savvy individual, you probably maintain profiles on a number of sites, right? Perhaps you have a Twitter, Google Reader, or Delicious account, or maybe maintain a blog or photo gallery. Isn’t it frustrating having to share that laundry list of sites with your friends and contacts every time they ask where to find you online?
Enter Sweetcron. It’s simple, it’s customizable, it’s everything in one place, and it’s likely a good match for you. Here are some particular reasons why you might want to consider it:
- It’s self-hosted, so you know everything is in the hands of you and your webhost.
- It’s designed with a robust plugin architecture to handle any sort of RSS feed you might want to throw at it, whether it contains text, audio, video, or more.
- The included theme, “Boxy but Good,” is slick and visually attractive.
- It’s considerably more easier to maintain than a traditional blog.
How can you pass an opportunity like that up? Take a look at my new Sweetcron-powered lifestream, for instance, at http://kadesoto.com– it even manages to make the mundane appear interesting, and there’s true value in that.
The flip side
Of course, with such a new piece of software, everything isn’t golden. Although Yongfook has done a great job putting the building blocks in place for a great user experience, there are a few reasons why you might want to hold off on installing Sweetcron for a month or so:
- Development is managed through Google Code, which I find clunky and nonintuitive.
- The entire community currently exists within a Google Group, which I also find clunky and nonintuitive.
- As you’d expect, themes beyond the default and “Boxy but Good” style are nonexistent.
- New versions of the code are being released more than once a day; that’s hard to keep up with.
Some users find these cons more than a little frustrating– there’s a small storm brewing within Read/Write Web’s comments; one individual even calls the release “alpha quality software.” As Yongfook’s response reminds us, though, not only is this software brand new, but it’s also being designed and maintained by one lone programmer. It’s up to the userbase to make the Sweetcron experience truly exemplar.
The conclusion
There’s no reason for any individual with a hosting plan not to install Sweetcron somewhere on their server. Slick, useful, and easy to implement, this lifestreaming software could just as easily be a web ‘presence center’ as a potential detour for blog visitors. The bottom line is that Yongfook has thrown us a great product, and now the ball is in our court. As users, it’s up to us to bring the community up to the level of the service.
(And yes, in case you were curious, this article was slated for yesterday. I was just too blasted busy playing with Sweetcron myself to get it out within 24 hours!)
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wow. thanks for the amazingly positive review!
I’ll just address a couple of your points:
1) The Google Groups / Google Code Wiki are clunky, I agree. The most important thing for me was hitting my promised launch date of the 28th, and to do that I had to forgo niceties such as setting up community / documentation functionality on the sweetcron.com homepage itself. That’s all on the way, though
2) New versions are being released too frequently now, I agree. This is because I want to fix important things as soon as I can. Once we stop finding bugs and development becomes more new-feature-oriented, the versions can be released less frequently and with more new stuff packed into them.
Cheers!
Yongfook
Hi Yongfook, thanks for reading!
What you’re saying about the Google implementation makes a lot of sense. I know many, many users were beginning to drool while waiting for the launch date! Many thanks for having it out on time.
Makes sense with the updates, too. Especially as upgrading is pretty simple at this point, it’s really not that much of an inconvenience. Hopefully you’ll pardon me, though, if I don’t update to 1.0.6 for day or two!
Drop by again some time; if you keep me in the loop I can write about further updates as they’re rolled out. Love the software.
I’m checking it out now. Thanks for alerting me to this service!
No problem Mike! Let me know what you think, okay?