posted on 2010-01-21 - amd.im/BB1C
For some time, I have had a sweetcron install setup as a lifestream at amdavidson.me. It has worked out alright, for the most part, but I think it’s time to put it out to pasture.
At first glance, lifestreaming seemed like a neat idea. One place to aggregate all of the content that I generate around the web. A “one stop shop” to see everything that I had been up to. It worked out exactly as it was intended. SweetCron faithfully sat in the background, pulling in RSS feeds from around the web and publishing them to my site.
Unfortunately, SweetCron is no longer actively developed. Yong Fook, who created the software, has open sourced it but there seems to be no real movement towards continuing it’s growth. He posted his reasons for this on his blog.
He makes a few very valid points in that post. The one that is most interesting to me is the impersonal nature of the lifestream. I think that really nails one of the aspects of the lifestream that never satisfied me. I don’t much interaction on any of my sites just a few views and even fewer comments. But the SweetCron site took it to another level, it removed my interaction from the site. There was (probably literally) no one involved.
The SweetCron site is still up and will be for now, but I won’t pay much attention to it. Instead I’ve been toying with a tumblelog for storing the things I find interesting around the web. For content that I create: check back here.
amdavidson.com is a simple blog run by Andrew Davidson, a manufacturing engineer with a blogging habit. He sometimes posts 140 character tidbits, shares photos, and saves links. You can also see posts dating back to 2005.