In recent months I’ve been using social networking sites like Twitter more than good old fashioned blogging as a way of getting my daily online fix. When I found Sweetcron, which is an aggregation come blogging platform it seemed the ideal way to catalogue all the stuff I was up to. Sweetcron is also really cool to fool around with and customise so it happily kept me amused for a few months. I could have an effective daily feed of things I was doing and it was almost like blogging by proxy. I even set up its own sub-domain to give the thing a home. My Lifestream ((The original stream image in this post was created by Trey Ratcliff))was born.
Well. I’ve decided to stop using it and here’s why.
Too Many Blogs!
I keep realising (and then forgetting and then re-realising) that if I set-up too many personal sites or blogs, I spread myself out way too thinly. I’m not the most prolific of bloggers at the best of times and if I’ve got to race round updating multiple sites, I’m just not going to and indeed didn’t bother. My Sweetcron site somehow became my lazy-blog. I knew I could fire off a few tweets here and there and the blog gods would be happy because I was doing my bit. So then this site site right here becomes like a ghost town. I even started giving out my Sweetcron address as the URL of my web-site. I’m such a cheat.
What’s sort of swung it for me are a couple of reasons. The first is that the Sweetcron Author himself has stopped using his own software and cites the impersonality of lifestreaming as one of the reasons. He’s actually moved onto Posterous as his blogging platform and makes regular updates. The second reason is that there’s a now a Lifestream Plugin for WordPress. I’ve installed it and without doing any customisation it already looks pretty neat. You can see it on this page. I’ll probably try and get my own style going there when I can get round to it but like I say, it looks pretty much OK as it is.
So What Now?
So, now that the Sweetcron site has bit the dust I’ll have to write in here more. I’m still going to have more than one site running but this place here will be for personal stuff. A proper blog with the attraction of an added Lifestream. I’m going to build a second site for geeky/linuxy/webby stuff and that will be more the start of business enterprise. We’ll see what happens. I’m going to need to find another income stream anyway since The Form Analyst has now closed its doors and is becoming a free site. Which kinda sucks!
Onwards and upwards…
I read Yong Fook's post on why he switched over to posterous. He, like you, wanted a blog, Sweetcron's not a blog platform, so the move makes sense. If you posting a lot of unique content, a blog's the way to go. Just as you've decided to use the wordpress lifestream plug-in, I still think there's a place for lifestreaming and sweetcron in this social networking world though.
For me, Sweetcron is a collection of my involvement across all the sites I use. For people who don't use those networks, but still find my posts useful, it's a central location they can come to check out or just subscribe to a particular RSS feed. For me in particular it usually breaks down into…
Latest tech news (Friendfeed & Twitter), viral videos (Youtube), artsy videos (Vimeo), new songs (Blip.fm) and latest web dev/design links (Mento.info).
I've recently just started to blog a bit more, so I have a wordpress install running along side my sweetcron at http://mitchmckenna.com/blog . When I post a video on facebook or twitter, I'll often post the link to the video on my site instead of the youtube or vimeo link. Bringing more hits to my site and people end up exploring more of my site such as my blog. With little dev from Yong Fook and all this commotion of him "switching to posterous" it will be interesting to see where the platform goes, lots of people are still deving on it and I hear several people talk of creating a fork.
I almost dropped WordPress to use Sweetcron alone. I just thought that a better solution for me would be to use WordPress with a Sweetcronesque lifestream plugin rather than use Sweetcron with a WordPressesque blogging ability. It's unusual for me as I usual go with the lesser known tool since that's the way I think.
I hasten to add however that my Sweetcron site is still lurking under the surface. The Database and site are still there. just not linked to a domain at the moment. I could always bring it back at a moments notice!