Jquery Lifestream Example Build Page

There are some pretty good implementation code examples as well as other instructions here. Another feature of this script is that it can be styled using CSS. There is also a demo page where you can create your own Lifestream and take the script for a test drive here.

The script currently supports the following feeds natively:
Bitbucket, Bitly, Blogger, Dailymotion, Delicious, DeviantART, Dribbble, Flickr, Foomark, Formspring, Forrst, Foursquare, Github, Google Reader, Instapaper, Iusethis, Last.fm, Mlkshk, PicPlz, Pinboard,Posterous, Reddit, Slideshare, Snipplr
Stackoverflow, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, and Youtube.

The code updates have been pretty active and many of them continue to add new services. So if you’re a little adventurous and don’t care about archiving stream items in your local database and want the easy flexibility to style your Lifestream with some custom CSS I recommend giving this code a shot. If you’re running WordPress and want to try something a little easier get the WP Lifestream plugin. I also have a list of many other scripts and options here.

I’ve heard from several people that once Twitter moved to OAuth authentication the plugin no longer worked to add Twitter accounts. Well now thanks to Rob McGhee there is a fix. Apparently there is a way to bypass OAuth if you authenticate via Android. So he’s posted details on how to modify the plugin file so that you can use this authentication method.

You can get all the details on his post here.

UPDATE:

In my post I state that support had ceased which was based on the official WordPress plugin page not being updated. Robert McGhee left a comment below stating that the plugin is now being maintained on Github and was updated last on January 25th 2011.

I’ve been using Pubwich at my site for a little while now and like the way it’s run. It’s neither easy to setup nor pain-free to get your services displayed but with a little knowledge of PHP you’ll be ready to go. Currently Pubwich supports Delicious, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Readernaut, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and RSS. The latest release supports GitHub and Gowalla as well, although not yet listed on it’s main site.

Pubwich is very young, in that not many sites are running it and the developer community seems to consist of only the author: Rémi Prévost. But I feel it’s got massive potential in the lifestream market. Rémi has appeared to include many great features. For one, extendability, each service is a self contained file allowing additional services to be added very simply. Second, no need for a database. Third, caching capabilities. And finally, a structured configuration file.

As I said earlier the editing the information isn’t very straight forward. But opening the configuration file you’ll see some preloaded items and by following those items, you’ll have your lifestream setup in no time. Opening up the default template and you’ll get a small idea of how to structure your custom look.

click to enlarge

Now for my experience with Pubwich. As I said, setup wasn’t crazy simple but it wasn’t difficult either. Pubwich is best to be looked at (at this point in time) as a lifestreaming script as opposed to a framework. You’ve got to root around in the config file and template files to get your lifestream working. As the development of the service proceeds, I’d love to see an install script and a configuration GUI that will allow for easier editing of the services and various options as opposed to running through the config file. Once I got the script setup, I looked at the design and messed with the CSS to get it styled the way I wish. But I wasn’t quite happy.

The built-in system for Last.fm was limited. It only allowed for top albums and top tracks. I didn’t care for this. I want to show people my latest Loved Tracks. So I dug into the Last.fm service file. I found out how to grab a different stream through Last.fm’s API and how to get an image for that track as well. After that, I had a nice stream from Last.fm, but I couldn’t get it to run through the cache system. Not a big problem, but one I’m waiting on a little support to solve. After that I messed with the Vimeo stream as well to get it working as I wanted. Same result. Not complete change, but I’m happy with the results.

Lastly, Rémi has released a new version with added features and more. But the latest release broke many of my custom usage issues (services still work, but the way I have it integrated into my site has failed). So I’ve had to roll back to a previous version so that I can run it the way I want. I’ll see if I can get the new version up and running soon.

My experience with Pubwich has been pretty good, and it does what I want it to. I’d love to see some work on an interface to make adding/moving/changing services simpler for the average user. I’d also love to see the option of integrating Pubwich into a database or even a flat-file that backups the items in which Pubwich streams in. I hope to see more developers jump on the code to spruce it up. I’m a horrible PHP coder, but I may just do what I can to improve the code.

Reasons to use Pubwich:

• Open Source
• Compartmentalized Lifestream
• No Database
• Help Improve your PHP Knowledge

Reasons to avoid Pubwich:

• You want something easy to setup and use
• You want your lifestream to backup your data
• You want many pre-built services
• You want a mature product

You can get Pubwich at it’s main site, and help with development at GitHub.

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.

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.

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

• Multiple User SweetCron Release which includes the source file
• Adding tinyMCE WYSIWYG In Sweetcron Blog Editor
• Enable Multiple User Feeds In SweetCron part1 & part 2
• Adding New Option In SweetCron

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.

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

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.

So I started by first downloading the required Hybrid theme framework and installed it. I recommend that you activate this theme and then go through the settings page to configure it the way you want. Then you can move on to downloading and installing the Life Collage theme. Once installed you can create your Lifestream by adding a new page and then selecting the included Lifestream template from the dropdown as opposed to the default template.

The template will provide a center column that displays short versions of your blog posts. Under that it will then display a ribbon of images courtesy of the FlickrRSS plugin. The Hybrid framework provides many custom widgets and the Life Collage theme adds a custom Lifestream widget that allows you to add as many external RSS feeds to be displayed in a two column format under the ribbon of images imported from Flickr.

So that’s about all this theme has to offer at this point but it is version 0.1 so perhaps we will see more features added to take advantage of the framework already in place.

Puddle is a self hosted lifestreaming script created as a side project from mobile game developer, OrangePascal. Puddle is simple to setup with no need for a database and can get you quickly up and running with it’s easy to use interface. This script—being young—still has a few hurdles to get over, but it’s promising feature-set could lead to an excellent self-hosted lifestreaming solution.

Installation and Setup

Kicking off the testing of Puddle was a pleasure as I simply needed to upload the script and I was ready to start adding services. The readme suggested setting the directory’s permission to 777, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this so I left mine at 755 and it is working just fine. The service adding interface is simple but elegant with nice AJAX menus that are nicely categorized. Puddle supports 36 service including a wide range of service types.

Puddle treats each imported item more like blog posts, instead of highly condensed items like most services. Puddle also can be used as your blogging system as it has the ability to create posts with a nice TinyMCE editor. Treating all items in this manner allows for easy integration with Disqus commenting system, which the script natively supports. The sidebar is fully customizable with the built-in plugins or with HTML/Text modules.

Nice

The script has some nice features that are often overlooked in things like lifestream plugins for WordPress. Chief among them is the importing and displaying some of the gathered data above and beyond just links. Services like Flickr and Vimeo have options for just importing your uploaded media or also including the “Liked” media. Tumblr imports the actual media posted instead of just a link to the original page. And Brightkite imports will display a small Google Map with pushpin identifying the location.

Not so Nice

As I said, this system is young. Although the setup was so simple and fun I was surprised when I had to add a cronjob to get the script to update from the services. Something so simple to run should offer a pseudo or simulated cron system in the backend to update the services on its own. Also, again due to it’s age, there’s not much documentation. I dove into a couple of the themes and although it doesn’t appear to be a difficult theming system, someone that doesn’t have much knowledge in php will feel a bit uncomfortable.

If you are looking for self-hosted solution for your lifestream, Puddle is a great start.  The script is hosted at Google Code and open sources so you can modify it to your hearts content.