Lifestream

[Savitri]

Hello,

I want to add a "life stream" to my blog. My CMS is ExpressionEngine. I do not want to change it. I know there are other services that do this, but design is important to me and need custom way to add my design.

So, how can I make this myself? Is there a script? I know a little bit of PHP.

Thank you in advance.

Savitri

[traq]

what is a "lifestream?" when I search for it, I get a wiki article about Final Fantasy VII... don't think that's what you're talking about...

[Medyman]

what is a "lifestream?" when I search for it, I get a wiki article about Final Fantasy VII... don't think that's what you're talking about...

It's blog-speak. It's like when people stream together on their activity on various social networking sites. So, it'll have your twitter statuses, what sites you "dugg", whatever you did on facebook, what blog you favorite on technorati. They're also called presence streams (presumably because they're an aggregation of your online presence).

But, it does this as it's happening (or usually at like 15-20 minute increments). So it's a running stream of your online life so to speak.

[Medyman]

I want to add a "life stream" to my blog. My CMS is ExpressionEngine. I do not want to change it. I know there are other services that do this, but design is important to me and need custom way to add my design.

So, how can I make this myself? Is there a script? I know a little bit of PHP.

First, what services do you want to aggregate? There are some plugins already available for ExpressionEngine for things like Flickr and Twitter.

If you want more services, you can try to create your own. Most of these services are based off of and/or ouput RSS feeds of your activity, either through the frontend or through their API. So, the basic concept here would be to combine all of these feeds and then do whatever you want with them.

SimplePie is a script that I've used in the past that can easily combine multiple feeds. It might be a start. I've read some warnings about using it on a PHP 4 environment, though I think it still works on 4.3+.

Addition:
I was a little intrigued by this idea, so I did some Googling. In fact, I was more spot-on with my SimplePie suggestion, than I had initially anticipated. A lot of people are using SimplePie for self-hosted lifestreams.

I think I might even give this thing a try. I'll post back with any results.