my lifestream

The old concept of getting your brain subscribed to has a reincarnation into the lifestream idea : add a page to your blog listing all your timed actions on the web. I stumbled upon it via the Lifestream – ala wordpress post containing a link to the original Streaming my life away article by Jeremy Keith. After far too much time I managed to install Chris Davis’ Lifestream wordpress plugin. Here are some comments that may make it easier to install a lifestream page yourself. To begin, don’t download the plugin at the top of the page, but rather scroll down to comment 886-59 by Gunnar Hafdal and download via the link given there (or use this direct link). This version at least contains a readme file (even after reading through all the php-code of the other version I didn’t have a clue as how to use it, in the readme file I finally learned that you had to create a new page and use Lifestream as a page-template…). Next, I could’t get it working until line 78 of stream.php was commented out (the Copenhagen-time line). Also don’t use the Dashboard-Manage-Lifestream page in the hope to change your RSS-subsriptions, but rather hard-code them in the life.php file. Bear in mind that not all RSS-data will work with Lifestream. I’ve tried out all of the social bookmark sites of which the logo is given at the bottom of a post, and found that only six of them work without doing extra work : co.mments, digg, ma.gnolia, furl, netvouz and de.lirio.us (the last one modulo the fact that it doesnt give the accurate time). At the moment I’ve added just co.mments, digg, magnolia and netvouz to my lifestream but I may add other streams later. Of course one can solve problems with the other RSS-feeds by scraping them and writing new feeds which Lifestream (or rarther the underlying magpieRSS bundled with wordpress) can handle. I assume this is the idea behind the other Lifestream plugin by Elliot Black (I havent tried this one out). The last thing to do is then to change the stream.php file so that it produces a page with more or less the same look and feel of the rest of the blog. Apart from a few things which I still have to remedy, I’m happy with my Lifestream. Now it is time to have a serious go at some of these social-bookmarking sites…