Last week InspiredMag wrote a post listing 10 Wordpress themes for your blog with details along with links to live demos for each of them. I had several of these already listed in the create section as well as some that aren’t on there. I have since added these to the ever-growing list.
One thing to keep in mind is that all but one of these are premium themes (read they’re not free) ranging from $25-70. Still they are definitely worth taking a look at if Lifestreaming is an important component of your Wordpress blog and you’re looking for ways to enhance it. At the very least they could be used to provide inspiration (as the site’s title suggests) for your own personal design.
Props to InspiredMag for discovering and highlighting this batch of Lifestreaming Wordpress themes. I’m very happy that Lifestreaming continues to get good exposure in the design community.
Chris Spooner has written up a very thorough tutorial on how to create a self hosted Lifestream. This tutorial takes you through creating a design for the site as well as the individual feed elements, coding the site using XHTML/CSS, and then using SimplePie to power the importing of all your feeds.
He provides images outlining each step of the process as well as detailed code samples in the post. He even provides a downloadable package of all the code used in the tutorial. I looked at the code he provides, and it’s very clean and simple. Only a single 73 line php file, stylesheet, and the SimplePie code, although I highly recommend downloading the SimplePie code from their site and also viewing the tutorial on it Chris has provided.
This is a very nice writeup that provides good information for anyone trying to roll their own Lifestream. You can also view the site he created from the code here.
Site: Martin Gardner
Code: Custom
Site: Pinar
Code: Custom
Site: Aline
Code: Lifespot & FriendFeed
Site: Mr. Yap
Code: Flickr & Twitter API with CSS, XHTML, and JSON
Site: Ryan Parr
Code: Custom
A few weeks ago I called on the Lifestream Blog readers to help me design a Logo for the site. The power of the internet shines again as I was fortunate to have Jim Murphy put me in touch with Amanda who runs her own site at artofthesteal.com. With just a few thoughts from me and time spent understanding the purpose of my site she did an amazing job of capturing a fantastic logo that I am extremely happy with.
During the process we bounced back some emails and then eventually started IM’ing quite a bit. Over the years I’ve worked with quite a few designers and she offered great advice and insight that rivals that of paid professionals I’ve used in the past. Here’s an excerpt of an email she sent me to give you an idea.
The text flows along the baseline, so it gives you the feel of your EKG! Then the actual flow of it, of course… since there’s no interruption between the letters… well is the flow (like a river or stream) that we were talking about. Then the dot of the eye will be a synapses/quasar sort of thing- and it can stand on it’s own.It would give you a lot of variations, and you could use the dot as an icon.
She was a joy to work with and I highly recommend anyone who needs any design work to give her a shot. I know you’ll be happy.
Lifestream Blog Logo by