New Blog Feature: The Lifestream
I’ve always thought that Chris Pirillo’s social media aggregation page on his website is an excellent idea. After all, we use so many different web services these days, it’s a good idea to have them all collected in one central place to say “this belongs to me” and have outgoing links to different posts that you’ve made, and incoming links back to your own site.
Short of coding it from scratch, I wasn’t aware of any way to add my own social media aggregation to my website. But today, I found just the thing; a Wordpress plugin by Kieran Delaney called SimpleLife. In a nutshell, it’s a lifestream for all your social media content that has an RSS feed. You can include it in any Wordpress page, or use it as a widget in the sidebar. It includes a few different services built-in, such as Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, and Facebook, and includes four other feeds of your choice. Just put in the feed URL and icon and you’re good to go. Well, mostly.
Getting everything to work properly wasn’t quite as smooth as I thought it would be, and there’s still issues I’ve yet to fix. But luckily there’s a lot of documentation on the plugin, and plenty of people posting their own feedback in the comments section. So, if you’re having a problem with it, chances are someone else has already had that problem and there’s now a solution.
The plugin has allowed me to include my own lifestream on reemixx.com, which will update in real time as I make updates to each web service that I use. I’ve found it to be an excellent way to keep track of people’s online activity, and hope it’s of use to some of you.
Speaking of Chris Pirillo; I recently downloaded his new theme “WicketPixie”, and one of the first things I noticed (while pulling it apart for kicks) was his or Chris Davis’ creative use of Wordpress’ Dynamic Sidebars.
If you’re in to theme editing, then creating a page that calls a number of sidebars with RSS feeds for each of your social media accounts would result in pretty much the same thing. It’d also be a lot more customisable to your needs (presumably) then any plugin…
You could even take it one step further and make widgets for each service, or mix some other feeds in there…
PS. What happened to your site? I liked the previous theme a lot more… Still looks nice though.
Jiahadye - Sure, that’s another option. I haven’t looked at WicketPixie yet since Chris Pirillo made it available. I’m not too keen on it to be honest, but grabbing it and taking it apart is a good idea :)
Using a plugin is just easy, and the developer is actively supporting it and future versions, so I might just stick with it for now. Plus it’s customisable enough if I wanna mess with the CSS.
As for the old theme, it was one that I modded rather than created from scratch, so it didn’t really feel like mine, and definitely didn’t validate too well. I liked the way it looked, but it took longer to load, had major differences in each browser, etc. Also, I’m a bit of a minimalist. Cheers for your opinion though, keep it coming :) Feedback is good.
Somehow I completely skipped over the navigation, and even spent a second looking for it (not that it’s big and orange or anything). I eventually found my way to your new Lifestream page - and I see what you mean; that kind of thing would be better done with a plugin (which I may have to look in to). I was just thinking of a page with a bunch of separate feeds in columns, not all in one.
And I know where you’re coming from with the site design, I guess this theme just kind of reminds me of a “High Contrast” Windows 98 or something :P …
That sounds like a really usefull plugin. I only really use flickr and twitter (which i’m not that into) though, might give it a go. I took a look at your ‘lifestream’ page and it seemed to take a long time to load, not sure why, I’m using Safari though so that might be some of the problem.
Jiahadye: Haha, I wasn’t thinking of high contrast colours for Win98 when I made it, but now that you mention it…. :)
Steve: I’ve noticed this problem too, and I think it happens in all browsers. Not sure why, might just be the way the plugin is coded, or possibly the amount of items I’m trying to load at once. I’ll have a look into it. Thanks.
According to the Net tab in Firebug, it takes a couple seconds to download each Favicon from the various sources, which ends up taking about 17seconds total on my PC…