One of the things I had in mind when I switched (a few months ago) from Pair to Pair Lite was to run a Sweetcron feed as the home page for the domain: that way, the loyal readership (both of you!) would have all my online activity in one easily-remembered url.
This morning, I finally got around to installing it. There were problems.
First, sweetcron uses various mod_rewrite games in .htaccess to make its urls simpler. But sweetcron’s mod_rewrite rules didn’t get along very well with the ones for MediaWiki. The fix: move sweetcron to its own subdirectory.
Second: I tried to add a few feeds (using the minimalist but functional Sweetcron dashboard page), but half the time Sweetcron complained that it couldn’t find a feed at the specified url. Um. Google Reader didn’t have any trouble, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the feed.
Third: Amazon doesn’t provide an rss feed for wishlists. (It’s possible to generate one, with appropriate third-party software. But that would be work.)
Fourth: of the feeds that Sweetcron did recognize, half of them didn’t display properly. A Flickr photostream feed with all HTML tags escaped looks really strange.
I suppose I’ll keep messing with Sweetcron. Maybe its problems can be fixed, and it will become useful. But it certainly made a very poor first impression.
Update: the Flickr problem is apparently a bug in SimplePie, which Sweetcron uses to parse RSS feeds. I found a discussion of this problem in the Sweetcron discussion group [here]; the suggested fix did improve the feed rendering a bit. But not enough: I could see pictures, but they weren’t linked back to the Flickr photo page. That’s a violation of Flickr’s terms of service, i.e., a big no-no. So Sweetcron is pretty much useless as far as Flickr feeds are concerned.
