I found myself with the option of working out what had gone wrong (the server wouldn’t even boot properly) which I may have managed, or to bite the bullet and start again with a fresh install. I went for the latter because I really couldn’t be bothered with the former and it would enable me to build a few applications in a way I wished I’d done on the first install. Fortunately due to WP-DB-Backup and rdiff-backup I was able to rebuild and restore quite quickly. DefCon 1 at 8.30am, multi-user subscription website and server back up and running at 2.00pm. I even managed to get a temporary forum up and running so that the users had somewhere to hang out. That was on-line at 9.00am.

The new set-up has Nginx proxying to Apache. I’d wanted to do it for ages and so now Nginx serves up the static content, Apache looks after all the PHP and other swanky malarky. I also did a review of the plugins on the site and found that one was really slowing things down to a crawl. It was Social Access Control that seemed to be strangling the server. I swapped it out for Justin Tadlock’s Members plugin. Things are a lot swifter. Maybe I didn’t have Social Access set-up correctly, who knows, it’s toast now. Members takes a little bit more messing about with templates to get it running sweet, but I like the concept and it’s there to stay over at TFA.

I was thinking of writing a few posts on the way I’ve got Nginx and Apache working in tandem but all I did was Google their names with the word proxy thrown in for good measure and all the help you need is already out there.

Google is your friend.

Automated Lifestream Blog Software

Sweetcron is software that pulls in the feeds offered by other sites, ideally your own or your own accounts. In particular it’s an excellent tool to aggregate all your social networking updates, uploaded images, loved songs, bookmarked links, favourited videos etc etc. If you use a site and you have a presence there, if that site has an RSS feed of your activities, Sweetcron can deal with it.

Having a site pull in a boat load of stuff is cool, but what’s the point. Well, you can serve up those feeds in any way you want and each individual feed item can display as much or as little information about itself as you want, provided of course that the information is in the feed in the first place. My personal preference is for bite sized chunks or excerpts which is probably the way most people go.

The really cool thing about it all is that once you’ve decided which feeds to import, figured out how you want them to be displayed and tweaked things a little, you can pretty much walk away and let it get on with things all on its own. If you haven’t got access to a cron utility, which is how the thing is automated, Sweetcron has a built in pseudo cron to update every 30 minutes.

So you end up with an automated sort-of-blog that records your activities. If you can’t be bothered blogging for a while but nevertheless continue tweeting or other such funky things, your legions of readers can see what you’re up to. If you still don’t get it, no worries, there’s plenty more other things to get excited about. The bottom line is, I think it’s fun.

Blogging

I mentioned that I nearly abandoned WordPress completely when I found Sweetcron. Well; as well as having all the super cool feed capabilities, Sweetcron has a built-in blogging feature. You can either have the blog posts feature amongst all the other items or even have them displayed more prominently, as in WordPress et al. The blogging facility isn’t as complex as WordPress’ but to be honest I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s just there if you want it and it’s more than adequate for the task. I suppose you could say that you use WordPress for blogging but hey it can import RSS if you want, you can use Sweetcron as an RSS aggregator but hey it can do blogging if you want. Easy.

I’ve decided that the fun thing would be to interlink the two. Sweetcron takes the WordPress feed and WordPress can be made to list the Sweetcron latest items. Your blog then doesn’t get all cluttered and your lifestream just becomes that, a record of your day to day interaction with the interweb, all on its lonesome. Sweet.

Themes

Just as in WordPress, Sweetcron is themeable. OK there aren’t kazillions of themes out there but it’s relatively easy to get build your own theme based on the default ones that come supplied with the software or one of the third party themes available.

I’m currently using the SocialCubes Theme by Derek Punsalan. Tweaked a bit as usual by me. As always I’m intending to build my own theme from scratch but hey, I’m a slow worker remember!

I found a couple of pages that list Sweetcron themes:

• Sweetcron Themes
• 25 of the best sweetcron powered lifestreams

So Let it Roll

So there you go, my Sweetcron lifestream is up and running and there for all to see. If you fancy one yourself and want some help, you can join the Sweetcron Google Group or just contact me and I’ll be glad to help out where I can.

Sweetcron and Nginx

I use the alternative (to Apache) web server Nginx to run my sites. It took me a while to figure out how to get Sweetcron to work happily under Nginx as there’s some rewriting to be done. After ages I finally figured out a way to make it work. The details are below after the read more:

Server Config:

# ———-

server {

location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/foo.bar.com/index.php;
}
}

#———————-

The /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params are unchanged from those that work for WordPress etc:

#———————-

fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;

#—————————–

In system/application/config/config.php I made sure this line read like so:

#——————————

$config['uri_protocol'] = "REQUEST_URI";


#——————————

Hope that helps someone out.