A few weeks ago I decided to set up a new service on my personal website to track all the social services that I’m a part of. Basically I wanted a central place where people could go to find out what I was up to, what pictures I was posting, and where I’d been. Now, I know there are services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! that do this on a larger scale but I don’t foresee many of my family members signing up for those just to see what I’m up to.

Enter Sweetcron, a free Wordpress like PHP and MySQL content system specifically built to handle lifestreaming. I heard about Sweetcron from my buddy Ryan and decided to give it a try for my new site. To my excitement it was exactly what I was looking for. Below I’ll cover the installation, interface, and end result of my Sweetcron experience.

Installation

Sweetcron is the easiest content system I’ve set up in quite some time. You download the compressed files and upload them to your server, create a MySQL database, and edit a few lines of a configuration file with the info. Once this is done the script has a built in installer that runs to finish the installation. By the time you’ve gone through this process you’ll have a username and password through which you can login to your Sweetcron administration section.

Interface and Use

Once you’ve logged into the back-end of Sweetcron you’ll see a few pretty basic options. Write: for posting quick notes, items: a list of your imported (published or unpublished) feed items, feeds: a list of the feeds you’re importing, and options: which contains basic account settings. Setting up your feeds to be imported into your lifestream is a piece of cake. Grab RSS from your favorite social networks and add them into your feed list¹.

Adding a Feed

Feed List

Imported Items

Sweetcron will automatically format and grab the necessary items related to the feeds. From there you can select from a few different themes of how you want your information to be displayed. If you’re ambitious you can set up your own theme by using the Sweetcron documentation.

Pulling Results via Cron

As the name suggests Sweetcron is reliant on pulling information from your RSS feeds at a regular interval in order to update your database. To do this Sweetcron works in one of two ways. First, you can use a pseudo method that will have Sweetcron update itself if the last update is older than 30 minutes. This method waits for someone to hit the site and then has that visit trigger the fetch. This may work for people without cron hosting access but I found the normal cron method to work better. To set this up I logged into my hosting administration and had the following cron job run every fifteen minutes:

/usr/bin/curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link Note that sweetcron uses curl and this program may be located at different locations on different hosting providers, for instance:

curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link

End Result

The end is a great looking lifestream that stores all of your information into a MySQL database that you host. The benefits are awesome. First, you own look and feel of the information output. Second, you don’t have to rely on a 3rd party service. And last, the whole setup is opensource, free, and easy to set up.

1. If you have issues with a particular feed’s RSS being supported I’d suggest routing it through Feedburner first and then importing it into Sweetcron. I had to do this with Brightkite.

Python’s strong tradition of pretty, easy-to-look at code is cemented in documents such as PEP 8 and other “Python Enhancement Proposals”, written and by members of the Python community. Other languages such as VB and C# tend to have an inherent cleanliness to them, and their user bases (and Microsoft) have created common opinions on what good code looks like.

But PHP isn’t so pretty – quite the opposite actually. Because of its structure, syntax, and other “features” beyond the scope of this blog post, it is all too easy to create spaghetti code in PHP. This is why the PHP community needs an *Official* style guide.

This can be incredibly important for PHP. Style guides do exist for the language – for example, various Open Source projects define their own style guides – but none are universal, to my knowledge at least.

Having an official style guide would help point the PHP community to a more central standard of what clean PHP code would look like, or at least help the beginner to intermediate PHP programmer write cleaner code that looks like other PHP code out there. It would also be easier to share code among the various code bases out there, too, and use publicly available code that already exists for your own or other projects. Everything would “fit” better.

Having an official standard would create an “ideal” code format, and help all PHP developers read and share code. Which for any language, is a good thing.

I’ve recently found two open-source PHP development frameworks with great potential: CakePHP and PRADO.

CakePHP is inspired by Ruby-on-Rails (RoR). Rather then create a ported version of RoR – a Ruby centered framework – CakePHP was developed to be a comparable system for PHP that makes use of the language’s various strengths. It also helps force PHP developers to organize their code and helps avoid disorganized “spaghetti code.” The project’s website explains CakePHP as

“… a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.”

It is intended to be easy to learn (”it’s cake!”). Developers who use CakePHP are called “bakers.”

While CakePHP takes inspiration from RoR, PRADO takes inspiration from Delphi and Microsoft’s excellent .NET framework. The code in PRADO-based applications looks unique for PHP – and as an ASP.NET developer – I notice many similarities to ASP.NET code. Pradosoft.com describes PRADO as

“… a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5.”

I look forward to trying both frameworks and seeing what they can do.

We just installed this WordPress blog on our servers and I must say, it is beautiful. Well implemented, easy to use, well documented. In my search for blogging software I thought I would find a few options for an ASP.NET package… I only found one, .TEXT at http://www.gotdotnet.com

Being an ASP.NET shop I was floored that there were not more options to select from. Why is that? I’m not trying to start a flame war with PHP, JSP and ASP.NET all of these languages have their merits and their flaws, but why hasn’t the ASP.NET community delivered some nice open source blogging software?