Introducing BramVanDamme.be

Bram Van DammeBram.us always went along with the tagline “Days in the Life of a Geezer named Bramus!” As of last week this is no more as this site doesn’t fully track my online trail as – next to this blog – I’m blogging on Nieuw in Gent, tweeting all day long, uploading pics to flickr, bookmarking on del.icio.us, listening to music, etc.

Over the weekend I decided to set up a site that tracks my online trail and ended up by installing (and modding and stripping down) SweetCron, an Automated Lifestream Blog Software. Yes that’s right, SweetCron can be seen as a self-hosted friendfeed. Now, what else than choosing my own name as domain name to run SweetCron on? Without further ado I point thee towards BramVanDamme.be, aggregating all my data.

BramVanDamme.be
My (stripped down) SweetCron Setup

Inspired upon Rober Palmear’s LifeStream you’ll see that I’ve modded my SweetCron Setup quite a lot actually: Stripped the tags and search features; Removed the pages; … Basically I kept it to a bare minimum: Each entry posted holds the content, a link to the original, a link to seeing all items of the particular site (in case of a tweet click on my avatar, in case of a loved track click on the heart, etc.), and that’s it. No more – No Less.


A Typical SweetCron Setup

Right now I’m still writing some more SweetCron Plugins (already wrote one in order to fetch album and artist data/covers for my last.fm favorites via the last.fm API) in order to extend it with some extra functionality so that it also tracks my commenting activity on Flickr amongst other stuff I’m planning on adding (if it’s got RSS, it’s add-able; If it hasn’t got RSS, get creative).

Yeah yeah, I know: the added value is practically zero if you’re already tracking me on the various sites, yet the inner geek in me (and you I presume too) rejoices/must rejoice when looking at it from a technical point of view (the power of RSS!). Above that it’s easy to point old friends to there (in order for them to add me on the various sites they’re acitve too) instead of having me to send them about 10 links 😉

Oh, if you want to set up your own SweetCron Lifestream and aren’t that savvy with all the technical stuff, then I suggest this tutorial right here, walking you through it.

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Unless noted otherwise, the contents of this post are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and code samples are licensed under the MIT License

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