Mark Philpot spent quite a bit of time testing several different Lifestreaming apps including Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few other custom scripts. He ended up being fairly happy with the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress but wanted to create a more customizable view. So he decided to write some custom PHP code to do just that.
Click image to view Mark’s Lifestream using this script
His code utilizes the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress to pull data stored by it in the Wordpress database. Then he’s added quite a few nice features:
- Attractively display your lifestream by event type
- Supports jQuery plugin imgPreview for posts with a thumbnail entry in the feed
- Supports jQuery plugin lightbox for Flickr images
- Supports ContentFlow (Cover Flow implementation) to display vi.sualize.us images
- Supports AJAX retrieval of more history for each event type
He’s provided the source code for it here and you can read more about it here.
I discovered a new open source Lifestreaming platform written in Django that comes to us from Krzysztof Klinikowski of Poland.
He describes it as
Lifestreaming Platform, multilanguage and multiuser. Written in Django, using modern technologies, microformats friendly. Clean and beautiful.
Here is a screenshot of a user profile (click to visit)
This is an alpha release but you can download the code from Github and he has a demo version running here. You can read more about Krzysztof’s other projects and contact him here.
If you’re not familiar with SweetCron, it’s a very popular opensource web app that was allows you to self-host your own Lifestream. Released just over a year ago, and developed by web designer Yongfook, it was designed with beautiful aesthetics in mind. It has become one of the most popular Lifestreaming apps out there for individual use and if you have been watching the Lifestream Galleries that I frequently post where I highlight some of the best custom Lifestream galleries on the web, you’ll notice that many of them use SweetCron.
Well I’ve recently come across a developer named Wan Mhod Azri who has been blogging about and releasing all kinds of mods for the SweetCron platform. His latest release provides a tutorial for creating an iPhone compatible SweetCron theme. But this is just the latest in many projects he’s worked on for SweetCron.
Here’s a few others
If you are a SweetCron user then you are definitely going to want to visit Wan’s site and follow him on Twitter to learn more about ways to tweak your SweetCron.
Tanzim Saqib has an impressive record as a developer. He has worked for several companies including Pageflakes and is currently at BT. Tanzim has released an open source framework to create a fully customizeable, themeable and easy to configure Lifestreaming app built on ASP.NET 4. This is only the second .NET based open source Lifestreaming project that I have seen. The first was another impressive app called Amplifeeder which I wrote about in February.
The system was designed to be easily extended by offering a plugin architecture. Tanzim has provided a very detailed and lengthy post announcing this release that includes screenshots, diagrams of the classes used as well as code snippets. It really looks like a very interesting project worth looking at. The only issue though is the fact that it can be very difficult to find a web host that currently supports ASP.NET 4 which is currently in a beta release. I have recently become aware of the Microsoft Web Platform which I haven’t looked into yet but would imagine could be used to host MyStream. Perhaps someone can shed more light in the comments.
Tanzim has voiced an open call for all developers who are interested in joining the MyStream development team. He’s looking for many facets of contribution including writing plugins, improving the scale and architecture, fixing bugs and helping design attractive themes. You can find the MyStream project hosted at mystream.googlecode.com
Chris Myles embarked on a sailing trip that lasted 5 1/2 years, spanning 32,800+ miles, where he visited 24 countries, and spent 160 nights at sea. He wanted a way to be able to share his adventure including maps, photos, videos, and blogging easier, so he decided to develop his own app. Blurbits is the result of his effort.
example of Blurbits
I played around with the above Blurbit which can be found here and enjoyed navigating the map and discovering the associated content used to document each leg of the journey. Clicking on the previous / next links would refresh the map to the next location traveled, generate a content popup (photo or teaser blog post) and then refresh the frame below with whatever additional content was available. There are also several other funtions provided on a navigation strip to view the stream in different ways, along with the ability to view additional related content such as Wikipedia entries represented as icons based on geo locations. It’s a bit difficult to explain, so your best bet is to go visit the site and play around.
Using Blurbits to generate your own travelstream will require some patience to learn the system. The basic concept behind Blurbits is a set of online tools which requires you to learn and append custom URL parameters to the existing URL paths of their tools. You can view some examples and learn more about how to create Blurbits on this page. But if you really want to understand the complete toolset your best bet is to start by visiting the Blurbits introduction page that provides resources to the complete system.
It’s a pretty extensive set of utilities and I can’t really provide extensive info here, but if I’ve piqued your curiosity, it’s worth taking a look. Also, if you find using a Lifestreaming approach to document your travels interesting, then you may also want to take a look at this post I wrote which also covered another person putting together a tool-set to do something similar.
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