I read this post over at MakeUseOf.com titled “How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps”. This is a good tutorial and utilizes the very popular Simplepie RSS framework which I’ve written about many times that has been used to create custom Lifestreams. However I wouldn’t call this exactly easy. If you want to get a nice pretty feature rich Lifestream up in Wordpress I still recommend the Wordpress Lifestream Plugin as the easiest method.

This How to is very good and offers nice details on how to configure Simplepie and customize a page in Wordpress to create your Lifestream. However it requires editing PHP code and messing with Wordpress templates, so if you’re comfortable with that, then this How to is right up your alley.

From the post

First of all, you’ll need some plugins for your Wordpress blog.  Remember that if you have a current installation of Wordpress, you can install these plugins directly from the “Install Plugins” section of the Admin of your Wordpress blog.  I will also link to the plugins’ pages so you can get an idea of what to search for and how to install them.

• SimplePie Core (needed for “SimplePie” plugin for Wordpress)
• SimplePie plugin for Wordpress
• Exec-PHP (gives you the ability to run PHP code in text widgets, posts and pages)

via MakeUseOf.com | How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps

I have seen several themes that take a slightly different approach to Lifestreaming where instead of simply providing a reverse chronological output of all the items from your stream, they segregate the output. I quite like this approach because many times if you post infrequently to some services they get lost quickly, never to be found again. With a segregation method you can highlight specific feeds regardless of the last time you published to them.

Aggregator provides this functionality and while it’s not a theme specifically designed for Lifestreaming, it can easily be adapted for it. It provides a display approach very similar to Alltop or Popurls. It’s powered by Simplepie so you know its feed handling is going to be solid. Lastly this is a free theme so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Here are some of the features it provides

• Widget based layout – add as many feeds as you want using one single widget again and again.
• Specify post count on each feed.
• While aggregating feeds for image / video site, you have an option to display the feeds as images or post titles.
• Aggregate feeds of any kind – blog posts, flickr images, video or audio
• On hover of the feed news titles, further snippet of the article is displayed
• 2 detailed colorschemes
• Drop-down menu
• Normal blog, single post and page layouts, comments are also well designed.

Also be sure to check out Livetwit which is another neat theme specifically built for a Twitter user or search results output.

via Aggregator – all your feeds at your website front. | Templatic.

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.

Woo Themes has added yet another Lifestreaming theme for Wordpress to their arsenal. This new one is called MyStream. Here’s a breakdown of its features:

A social profiles widgetized zone with custom widgets to display your Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, etc, profiles in the sidebar.
7 Smashing MyStream-specific widgets, including the new Tabber widget, which allows you to move that stunning tabber anywhere in the sidebar.
Flexible 3 column layout with a variety of different widgetized spaces & layouts.
6 delicious colour schemes to choose from!
Last but not least, the brand new WooFramework2 with updated options panel

The theme offers short blog excerpts and links to 4 social media profiles in an about area. It also offers a stander aggregated Lifestream list but also supplements that with a widgetized photos & videos area in the sidebar. The theme costs $70 and you can get more details on it here and see a demo of the theme here.

Note there are many Lifestreaming themes available for Wordpress and I’ve provided a list of all of them here.

The other day I saw Chris Prillo sent out a message announcing that he was launching Lockergnome.net as a free Wordpress blog / Lifestream Archive. Of course I quickly had to go see what Chris was up to here. Here’s a post where Chris explains why you should sign up for the service.

After visiting the site I realized that Chris was using BuddyPress to power it. Buddypress is a way to add a social network layer on top of Wordpress MU. I then started to test the site out and later saw that Chris had left me a message on it. I asked him about the motivation for creating the service which he responded to in a follow up post where he stated the following:

Been wanting to try BuddyPress for quite some time.

Been wanting to host WordPress blogs for quite some time.

Been wanting to help people archive their Social Media Lifestream data in a non-proprietary, fully exportable system for quite some time.

Ok fair enough, I can dig those reasons. So with BuddyPress, users can sign up and create their own blogs on the service utilizing Wordpress. To enable the Lifestreaming functionality, every blog has an install of the very popular WP Lifestream plugin. Also, they’ve setup the microblog inspired P2 theme as the default and only selection available with the free service. Premium accounts are available for $12.77 a month and powered by Page.ly which presumably will allow you to gain complete control over the blog as you would have from a standard self-hosted deployment allowing tweaks and installation of additional plugins and themes.

click image to see Lifestream settings page

When I first heard about the release of BuddyPress I quickly thought about how this could be used as a tool to create your own private Lifestreaming community which is exactly what he’s done here. Unfortunately the actual Lifestream activity itself seems to be relegated to the individual user blogs themselves and doesn’t appear on the home page under the “Site Wide Activity” which I think would be a nicer implementation that would expose user activity to the whole community. As it stands that section displays blog posts by users, wire posts (think Facebook Wall posts), and inter-network activity such as friending notifications. I’d really like to see the Lifestreaming activity integrated more.

Chris has created a pretty geeky and tech-centric community and connecting with that crowd on its own merit is a worthy reason for joining the service. Besides that you can also join to play around with a live BuddyPress implementation. Lastly, if you’ve heard about the WP Lifestream and always wanted to play with it but either don’t have a Wordpress site or didn’t yet feel comfortable installing it, you can now test it easily for free. Just remember you need to create a blog after you sign up to get access to Wordpress and the plugin.

Finally if you’re interested in setting up your own multi-user Lifestreaming community I’ve compiled a list of several options that are available besides BuddyPress. I’ll continue to watch the community on Lockergnome and you can connect with me here if you decide to try it out.

Update 1/15

Added screencast of the service