Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress
I liked the idea of a Lifestream view for my blog, so I took at Chris J. Davis’ Lifestream plugin. Unfortunately, it was limited to a small subset of RSS feeds, which I did not find useful. So, I rewrote the “engine” behind the lifestream to produce my own lifestream plugin. Enjoy!
Version 0.1 BETA! Use at own risk! Not production code!
Features: What it does
You might wonder what this lifestream implementation offers over others. The primary differences are:
- Pluggable, auto-detected data-source modules
- Disk-based caching interface
- RSS, Database, Facebook, Flickr API integration
WP-Lifestream ships with the following modules: Wordpress, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, and Wordie. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:
Download & Installation
This is the hard part. Download lifestream.zip. You’ll need to do the following, then:
- Put wp-cron.php in your plugins folder and activate it
- Put the entire data folder into your theme folder
- Put stream.php and life.php into your theme folder
- Customize stream.php to fit your template
- Put images/lifestream somewhere sensible and change the references to it
- If you want to use the Facebook or Flickr widgets, edit data/lib/common.php with your credentials
- Make things writable that need to be. Things like data/lib/flickrcache, data/lib/cookie.txt, and data/cache are good places to start
That’s a pain. I’ll make it easier in the future, I promise.
Adding a new source
Adding a new source is the easiest and most fun part of the new infrastructure. There are just three things to do:
1) Write a class which implements a method called Refresh(){…} which will be called whenever the caches need to be refreshed and a method called Items(){…} which should return an array[time] = array(title, link), and has a member name defining its unique display name.
2) Create a file for your new source, and put it in the data directory. It should call $lifestream->AddService with your class, like $this->AddService(new YourDataSource());
3) Create a nice icon and add it to the images/lifestream folder and in stream.php. In the future module classes will be fully encapsulated with their own styles and icons.
If you do create a new class of source, please email me and I’ll include it immediately!
Changelog
.01 - initial version
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 1:53 am and is tagged with theme folder, source modules, plugins folder, facebook, data cache, flickr, data directory, data source, widgets, caches, member name, wordpress, subset, credentials, screenshot, lib, array, infrastructure, lifestream, ships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
51 Responses to 'Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress'
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on December 14th, 2006 at 11:21 am
[…] tagged facebook, flickr, lifestream, linkyloo, plugin, wordpress and Wordpress Plugins View blog reactions If you enjoyed this post from Weblog Tools Collection please Subscribe to the RSS feed. RelatedPosts from the Past: […]
on December 15th, 2006 at 1:31 am
And where’s your Lifestream page?
on December 15th, 2006 at 8:05 am
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress by Elliott Back Plugin de Wordpress, que la verdad no entendi muy bien para que sirve, pero intuyo que es “chori” (tags: wordpress plugin plugins lifestream) […]
on December 16th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress by Elliott Back Interesting plugin tying various sites/services that a person may blog/post/interact with and creates a stream of all the information. May have to check this one out on Wordpress when I get some time (tags: wordpress plugins lifestream blogging WP plugin) […]
on December 16th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin der viser din aktivitet paa alle dine sites (tags: wordpress plugin) […]
on December 17th, 2006 at 9:24 am
[…] Lifestream，生成一个汇聚你网上活动的页面，自动更新，包括：Wordpress, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, Wordie。 这个安装步骤比较多： […]
on December 17th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress by Elliott Back (tags: plugin wordpress lifestream) […]
on December 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
Nice Plugin. Im going to test it. Does it support twitterupdates?
BTW: Im looking for a plugin that embeds a jabberwacky chatbot or different kind of chatbot in the sidebar for a wordpress system. Maybe widgetized. The important thing is, that this chatbot should be teachable by his users. Something like Prelude or A.L.I.C.E would be great. Any idea?
on December 24th, 2006 at 9:27 am
[…] Elliott Back ha riscritto il motore di Lifestream creando un plugin un po’ più versatile. L’installazione è ancora piuttosto complessa, ma si può cominciare a personalizzare parecchio il proprio “flusso”. […]
on December 31st, 2006 at 9:20 am
[…] Of course one can solve problems with the other RSS-feeds by scraping them and writing new feeds which Lifestream (or rarther the underlying magpieRSS bundled with wordpress) can handle. I assume this is the idea behind the other Lifestream plugin by Elliot Black (I havent tried this one out). […]
on January 19th, 2007 at 10:49 am
it would be nice to install and use lifestream as easy as sidebar widgets
on January 26th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Hi Elliot,
do you know how i can run the script under php4?
I like your option to cache the feeds.
My problem is that i´m a php noob.
Thank you,
Flo
on February 13th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Kieran
Just go into that file "common.php" and then edit the last line of the function "Refresh" (line 242) by putting a single tick ( ‘ ) after the facebook id and before the round parentheses )
on February 13th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Oops, I guess I was a bit careless in stripping out some private info, passwords and the like. Well, I will update this sometime in the near future and fix that, as well as refactor a few things.
on February 18th, 2007 at 3:52 am
[…] After spending way too much time going off on a search result linkfest, I was able to determine that this concept appears to have been the brainchild of Jeremy Keith. He explains his thoughts behind it in a post as well as providing the PHP script he used to create his Lifestream. But I was in search of a plugin for Wordpress so I made my way to the Chris J Davis site. Proving how small the web makes the world, Chris was inspired to write a Wordpress plugin after visiting Jeremy’s site as well as reading a post from Michael Heilemann. I’m thankful for Chris to have made the plugin available, but it’s by no means plug and play. You need to make special edits depending on which version of PHP you are using, you may need to run some feeds through a third party (like Feedburner) and the included CSS in the page template may not play nice with your theme. But still I decided to read the comments and hack away and with the help of a modified version of the code by Gunnar Hafdal and some of my own tweaks I was able to get mine up and running. I have also since seen another plugin created based on Chris’ by Elliot Back but haven’t given it a whirl yet. […]
on February 22nd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Hi Elliott,
Any chance you will be updating the plugin soon? Have you considered using API’s instead of feeds when available? Also some archiving or pagination would be good too…your stream is pretty large and the page takes quite a while to load. I look forward to seeing where you take this next. I think this concept can really take off soon.
Mark
on February 25th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I like the idea of a lifestream and tried the plugin but I am struggling how this appears on a page? What is the URL I need to use?
on February 26th, 2007 at 4:28 am
Yeah, there’s a chance of an update soon. I just got back from London so give me a while. I need to update this, do some work on another site, and some work on WP Autoblog.
on March 3rd, 2007 at 1:20 pm
[…] WP Lifestream keeps a log of your online activity (postings on various sites). I am definitely using this. […]
on March 17th, 2007 at 4:35 am
[…] WP Lifestream keeps a log of your online activity (postings on various sites). I am definitely using this. […]
on March 21st, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Trial that Thank you.
on March 24th, 2007 at 9:36 am
hey elliot, thanks for publishing this to the community.
I wonder though why I am getting a blank page. the css is inserted correctly. I changed all instances where my personal information had to be inserted, also I added a ‘ in common.php, it caused an error.
any idea?
thanks a lot!
on March 24th, 2007 at 9:58 am
oh basically I tried changing the cron job to “now” and it started to fill up the page. but only with wordpress posts.
when I got it set to hourly, I get
SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0
–
also none of the flickr etc. displays, I’d really like to give your code a shot, so if you find some time to update things, I’d appreciate that loads!
on March 28th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
any news elliott?
I am looking forward towards some testing
on April 1st, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Hey elliot
thanks for this. i did all as per your list. even added flickr. also setup a page called ‘lifestream’
www.yehmanas.com/lifestream/
but its all missing. what do i do to get this up and running?
on April 1st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
sorry
got the page template up. but i get this error
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in lib/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php on line 17
on April 1st, 2007 at 2:16 pm
shoot.
i only have php4, i think thats the issue.
on April 1st, 2007 at 6:14 pm
sorry for the comments back to back.
figured it out. turned off facebook source and it works. hopefully there will be a php4 version soon.
thank you.
on April 3rd, 2007 at 10:33 am
[…] Si quieren crear su lifestream en su blog desarrollado en Wordpress, les aviso que los plugins por ahora disponibles son bastante complejos de configurar e implican meter mano en sus templates. Pero si se animan, pueden ver en los blogs de Elliott Back y Chris Davis. También hay un plugin para Expression Engine, el sucesor de Pmachine. […]
on April 11th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
The unpopularity of naterkane…
I decided to start paying attention to my Feedburner and Google Analytics stats, and how can I put this… no one reads this blog. I found this lovely information out after installing the Wordpress Reports plugin.
I must admit that this info does m…
on April 14th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I am using a different lifestream now, but thanks for contacting me back then in march elliott!!
on September 16th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
[…] Cela dit, deux pluggins existent déjà qui permettent de concentrer tous les flux que vous pourriez mettre à jour quotidiennement : ici et ici … […]
on September 29th, 2007 at 11:47 am
[…] Un lifestream, dont le nom provient du plugin éponyme pour Wordpress, est un service Web qui aggrége les flux RSS/RDF/Atom “personnels” des autres services Web sur lesquels on publie des articles (notamment un blog), des photos, vidéos, annotations, ou provenant des services Web qui informent sur nos activités (playlist audio/vidéo, logiciels utilisés, etc). D’un point de vue technique, et à la différence d’un lifelog/tumblelog, un lifestream n’héberge pas de documents, et son contenu se résume à ce que les flux fournissent… Un flux RSS/RDF/Atom contient au maximum une vingtaine d’entrée. Lifestream Blog de Mark Krynsky vous donnera une liste de services, avec comparatif, de solutions pour avoir un lifestream/lifelog/tumblelog… A vous de faire la distinction ;o) […]
on September 29th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
thank you for your work, all works deserves a thank you
on October 9th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Wow, well, this plugin ended up being way too complicated for me. I’m not sure how anyone has gotten it to work, but hey more power to you if you did get it to work. I guess I’m confused because this isn’t really a plugin. It’s more of a hack or work-around. Ah well, thanks, anyway!
on October 16th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I agree with Pete, it is indeed rather a nice little hack than a plugin… cool work anyway man! Visit my site sometime!
www.skinned.co.nr
Godspeeeeed!
on October 22nd, 2007 at 7:30 pm
[…] Lifestream Plugin – could be better than Plaxo’s pulse if … but only if …. Tags:lifestream wordpress plugins […]
on November 4th, 2007 at 2:56 am
[…] To create your own lifestream isn’t complicated. Basically all your footprints can be connected through a series of RSS feeds. All social media support RSS feed so you just need to find a way to aggregate all the feeds and display each of them on a web page. If you want to turn your WordPress blog into a lifestream, here is a plugin for you. You can share all your footprints on facebook, flickr, digg, youtube, etc, and tell everyone where you have been, what you have done. A web site called Plaxo has a solution that helps you to create lifestream much more easier. […]
on November 8th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
[…] Manuela Hoffmann hat sich in ihrem Weblog damit beschäftigt und ein Beispiel eines solchen Lifestream sowie einige Links dazu zusammen gestellt. Für die einfache Umsetzung auf dem eigenen Webspace gibt es ebenso ein PlugIn für Wordpress oder den RSS-Combiner, der eine bequeme Verwaltung und Wiederveröffentlichung der eigenen Feeds erlaubt. Vorraussetzungen bei diesen Methoden ist jeweils, dass der genutzte Service einen RSS-Feed für die eigenen Aktivitäten zur Verfügung stellt. […]
on November 20th, 2007 at 8:23 am
taeltelze
on December 22nd, 2007 at 6:18 am
Hi,
Elliot, I was interested in lifestreaming, and i found your app.
However, it was a little frustrating to get to grips with, so I hacked together my own…. taking inspiration from your idea but using SimplePie.
Its now hit fully fledged plugin status, with admin options page etc, and WYSIWYG feed styling etc.
Cheers for the inspiration
kierandelaney.net/blog/projects/simplelife/
on January 9th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
[…] tags: lifelogs, lifestreaming Historiquement, on doit le concept d’archivage automatisé de nos activités à Vannevar Bush dans son article* de 1945 intitulé “As we may think” Un lifelog est une machine, un logiciel, ou un service Web dédié à l’archivage chronologique des traces de nos activités sous toutes leurs formes ; annotations, articles, présentations, courriers, vidéo, photos, et discours audio. Un lifestream, dont le nom provient du plugin éponyme pour Wordpress, est un service Web qui aggrége les flux RSS/RDF/Atom “personnels” des autres services Web sur lesquels on publie des articles (notamment un blog), des photos, vidéos, annotations, ou provenant des services Web qui informent sur nos activités (playlist audio/vidéo, logiciels utilisés, etc). D’un point de vue technique, et à la différence d’un lifelog/tumblelog, un lifestream n’héberge pas de documents, et son contenu se résume à ce que les flux fournissent… Lifestream Blog de Mark Krynsky vous donnera une liste de services, avec comparatif, de solutions pour avoir un lifestream/lifelog/tumblelog… A vous de faire la distinction ;o) Enfin, un lifecast est tout simplement un site internet qui diffuse en continu une retransmission vidéo (en direct ou différé) de notre quotidien. […]
on February 27th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress by Elliott C. Back […]
on February 29th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
[…] 2008-02-29 ReadWriteWeb published Catone’s article entitled “35 Ways to Stream Your Life” in which Catone listed ,Tumblr ,Onaswarm ,Jaiku ,Lifestrea.ms ,Soup.io ,FriendFeed ,MyBlogLog ,Profilactic ,iStalkr ,Correlate.us ,ProfileFly ,Second Brain ,Explode.us ,liveZuu ,OneSwhirl ,Socialthing! ,iminta ,Plaxo Pulse, ,Identoo ,Escaloop ,Hictu ,Life2Front ,30Boxes ,Readr ,Suprglu ,Where is me? ,Slifeshare ,MovableType ActionStreams ,SimpleLife ,WP Lifestream ,RSS Stream ,oneConnect ,Facebook (?) ,Socialstream ,Jeremy Keith’s Lifestreaming Script […]
on March 1st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
[…] Existen varios plugins que acercan tu identidad social a tu blog en WordPress: 1. LifeStream. Puedes descargarlo desde aquí y comprobar su resultado. 2. SimpleLife. Puedes verlo en acción 3. RSS Stream Se ve así Es el más simple de instalar y el que más servicios soporta (Twitter, Pownce, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, Photobucket y cualquier otro feed RSS) Versión también en español 4. LifeStream WP Plugin Soporta Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm y Wordie, pero toqueteando el código pueden añadirse más servicios. Buena interfaz. […]
on March 1st, 2008 at 6:23 pm
[…] Sosyal akım uygulamaları yazma ve toplama servisleri olarak ikiye ayrılmaya başladı. Yazma servisleri bütün Twitter, Thumblr, Facebook status ve benzeri uygulamalar. Toplama servislerinden kastımız bir çok farklı kaynaktan gelen mesajları toplu olarak okuma sağlayan servisler. Mesela Flickr’dan fotoğraflar, YouTube’dan videolar, Qik’dan canlı videolar, blogdan son yazılar, Last.fm’den son müzikler hepsi bir listede yayınlanıyor… Bütün bu kaynaklar RSS beslemelerden toplanıyor. Bu tür toplayıcı servislere örnekler: FriendFeed, Second Brain, ve Lifestrea.ms sayılabilir. Wordpress Lifestream eklentisi ve diğer bir blog yazılımı geliştiren şirket SixApart da MovableType için ActiveStreams adında blogunuzda toplayıcı görevi gören eklenti çıkardı iki ay önce. Bunlardan çok var tabi, en son ReadWriteWeb’de 35 tanesinden bahsedildi. […]
on March 2nd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
[…] WP Lifestream - Another lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress. […]
on March 2nd, 2008 at 2:27 pm
[…] WP Lifestream - Another lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress. […]
on March 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
[…] Lifestream WP Plugin for Wordpress by Elliott C. Back - […]
on March 11th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[…] WP Lifestream - Un altro lifestreaming plugin per Wordpress. […]
on March 14th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
[…] Another option I might look into is here. […]