Yongfook is a web producer based in Tokyo

Posted on April 12th, 2008 at 5:46 pm

Another year has passed, that one absolutely FLEW by…

Someone said to me the other day how quickly people’s outlook changes as they go through their 20s. It’s a decade of extremes, that’s for sure - in your early 20s people are quick to tell you that those years are supposed to be the best ones of your life, and then all of a sudden just a few years later you’re nearing 30 and friends now look at you sympathetically, give a sheepish coo and say things like “not long now, eh!” as you cringe and in your mind reach for a blunt instrument to strike them with but in reality just shrug pathetically and snort “heh yah lol”.

Me, I’m quite happy, really. I like being old(er). I’m even looking forward to my 30s. I think I make a much better middle-aged person than I do a young person :/

Thanks to all of you for your birthday wishes!

Also, today I want to announce a new project. Well, sort of new. A while ago I open-sourced the code to my lifestream app (you’re looking at the result - the software runs my blog) but I promised to make it more user-friendly for the mainstream. Well, I’m in the middle of doing that, and I’m also giving it a proper name and home on the web: Sweetcron.

Sweetcron is quite different to the alpha version of the software I released, which I called “Stampychan”. Stampychan was quite tricky to install and relied solely on the Tumblr API. Sweetcron on the other hand, is easier to install and you can use it with various services - think of it like Plaxo or Friendfeed, but something that you host on your own server and can style the look of to fit your own design.

Sweetcron will be this stuff and more:

• 100% free and open source
• Automagical aggregation of your activity across various websites - photos, diggs, tweets, youtube uploads etc etc; with the option to directly input regular blog posts too.
• 5-second install (like with Wordpress)
• Zero server config, no setting up of crontabs
• Comes with a theme out of the box that looks like my blog (I’m calling this the “Boxy But Good” theme)
• Service agnostic - no longer relies on the Tumblr API (but you can still use it if you want)
• Supports popular services (twitter, digg, youtube, flickr etc) out of the box, with an extensible architecture to let people write (and share) their own extensions to support other services.
• Ability to edit the data you import
• Valid, Semantic markup etc

If you like the sound of that, just sign up for notification on the Sweetcron site and I’ll send you an email when the software is available for download.

This isn’t some major new project for me, this is just something that I’m building anyway for my own use, and I figured other people might want to use it - I get quite a lot of “how you do dat?! fuxake tell me!!” mails from people via this website; Sweetcron will be my answer to them :)

It’s going to be a busy year for me. I’m going to be running a couple of projects like this (another one is also in development, and I think a lot of you have figured out what it is already judging by how many people have signed up for the beta test…but I won’t mention it in this blog post heh) as well as maintaining OSF (we’re putting out a book soon…more on that another time) and adding a sister site to OSF. Basically this year I’m going to be building up a few separate IPs, some based on user-generated content like OSF and some straight-up software services or downloads, like Sweetcron (all with tenuously food-related names of course). I’m also doing a fair bit of client and consultative work, all of the above keeping me very busy which is why I look like such a deflated sack of broken hammers most of the time.

Cheers and thanks again to those who wished me Happy Birthday. You will be spared when Kraagon comes to destroy us all.

Oh and finally, my little present to myself. I’m a sucker for watches. Gotta spoil yourself once in a while, innit.