Custom, Self Hosted Lifestream With Sweetcron

A few weeks ago I launched a new design here at Papertree and with that I tacked on a new fea­ture, enter my lifestream. There are a number of ways you can go about cre­at­ing a lifestream, but I decided to give Sweet­cron a try after read­ing this short tuto­r­ial by Chris Coyier, fea­tured on Net​tuts.com.

Why did I go with the self hosted Sweet­cron, when there are hosted plat­forms like Friend­Feed and Storytlr?

If you are like me and you like to be in con­trol of every­thing from con­tent to design you will under­stand my rea­sons for this deci­sion. Sweet­cron allows you to cus­tomize just about every­thing you can think of through a pretty slick tem­plat­ing system sim­i­lar to the way Word­Press works. The Sweet­cron plat­form comes stock with two “starter” themes one of which can be seen in a cus­tomized form on Yong​fook.com (also the cre­ator of Sweet­cron) and the other being a slightlty sim­pler ver­sion that I decided to pick apart. Beyond design cus­tomiza­tion you can also easily con­trol how each of your feeds dis­play using a series of inherit func­tions. (More on this later). And lastly I am able to add just about any­thing I can think of to my “stream” includ­ing RSS from a few other blogs that I try to pub­lish to on a reg­u­lar basis. So far so good.

After instal­la­tion and on to customization!

Skip­ping through install and basic con­fig­u­ra­tion which can be found in the tuto­r­ial men­tioned above or the Sweet­cron Google Group and head­ing straight to the cus­tomiza­tion. First you will need to nav­i­gate your way to the included themes by fol­low­ing the path system/application/views/themes. There I found the two themes men­tioned above right­fully names “boxy” and the “sandbox” theme. I choose to use the exist­ing themes to start with so I copied the sand­box theme and renamed it Sim­ple­ton based on the fact that my lifestream was intended to be simple and easy to follow. Then I started dig­ging through the files one by one. My design cus­tomiza­tions proved to be fairly easy, I simply edited the already avail­able classes on the short and sweet CSS file included with the sand­box theme. I found reason to add a few of my own but due to the sim­plic­ity of my design I was able to get away with using most of what was already present. I then went to the admin panel and decided to start adding a few feeds to test this sucker out. Adding a feed is extremely simply, just nav­i­gate on over to the feed tab in your admin panel and click add new feed, like this:

Easy enough right? So I went about adding a few feeds such as Flickr, Vot.​eti.me, Viral​think​ing.com RSS etc. and nav­i­gated to my lifestream home­page. At this point things were look­ing pretty nice I was happy over­all but I saw some room to tweak it a bit. More specif­i­cally here I decided that pulling feeds from my other blogs was great but I would prefer to only show titles and no excerpts. I knew that in the boxy theme the feeds had been orga­nized accord­ing to the source of the feed, so using that as a ref­er­ence I started chop­ping up my own theme to dis­play only a title, pub­lished date and a few tags. Here is an exam­ple of the code I used in the _activity_feed.php file (which con­trols how feeds display):

<!--Viral Thinking-->
<?php elseif ($item->get_feed_domain() == 'viralthinking.com'): ?>
<h2><?php echo $item->get_title()?></h2>
<ul class="item_tag_list">
<li>Tags: </li>
<?php foreach ($item->get_tags() as $tag): ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo $this->config->item('base_url')?>items/tag/<?php echo $tag->slug?>"><?php echo $tag->name?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

There now I had some­thing I could live with. After styling every feed I plan to run through the lifestream and making a few final touchups to the styling of the theme I ended up with the nice little pack­age that you can see now on lifestream.​papertreedesign.com. You will also notice that I decided to stick with the fairly simple nav­i­ga­tion using the paged fea­ture at the bottom and the tag clus­ter in the side­bar. My theory here is that as with most social net­work­ing sites such as twit­ter, people are most inter­ested in the here and now, in other words the most recent. How­ever the tag clus­ter is nice because some­thing might catch your eye. Sweet­cron is avail­able here. Happy lifestream­ing!

I would like to note that Sweet­cron also has a blog pub­lish­ing func­tion built in, tech­ni­cally you could use the plat­form as the face of your online pres­ence. I chose not to use this fea­ture being that my orig­i­nal inten­tion for cre­at­ing a lifestream was to serve up snip­pets of every­thing I am already involved in and 3 blogs is more than enough space to col­lect my ramblings