Roll your own lifestream with Sweetcron

Whilst there's certainly no shortage of hosted lifestreaming services to choose from, almost all of them are limited in the degree to which you can customise them. Sweetcron, on the other hand, is self-hosted (i.e. you install it on your own server) and open source, so is fully customisable / extensible. Created by an industrious Tokyo-based freelance web producer, Yongfook, it's an absolute joy to use. My current job means I don't get the opportunity to get my hands dirty with code anymore, so I've been enjoying tinkering around with Sweetcron's PHP and CSS to create my own lifestream and modules (the Last.fm module in the above screengrab is of my own composition). The only limitation of Sweetcron versus the current market leaders (apart from the barrier to entry created by self-hosting) is that it doesn't enable you to follow other users' lifestreams (although every instance of Sweetcron produces an RSS feed you can subscribe to). It's actually closer to microblogging service Tumblr in functionality and is likely to appeal to users who would otherwise have downloaded Wordpress.