For those of you who think that FriendFeed is too much of a time-suck (you are right, by the way, but what a fun time-suck it is!!) but still want to put all your various social network posts and upload into a single place, I will recommend Lifestream. I learned about it via Jenny Levine’s blog, The Shifted Librarian, and immediately thought it looked interesting – despite the fact that I have a FriendFeed account that does my lifestreaming for me. I installed it into my WordPress blog (the very one you are reading now) and then put a simple [lifestream] tag into my “about me” page on that blog. Pretty much instantly, a stream of information started showing up, giving folks who might be interested in me a way to see all of my Twitter posts, Flickr uploads, Facebook status updates and more. Of course, looking back on it now, it’s just Twitter posts and weekly blog updates about what I’ve been posting on Twitter. I need to get working on being more than a one-ring circus, don’t I?
Anyway, that is how I’m using it – a stream of activity, broken down by day, on my “about” page. Jenny chose to have her stream post to her blog, but since I’m already doing a weekly digest of all my Tweets to my blog, I thought that might be overkill…
One thing that occurred to me was that this might be a nice way to get the library’s “stuff” all together. I did the same thing – installed the plugin, entered the [lifestream] tag into the “about” page for that blog and was disappointed. Nothing more than “no events to show at this time” is displaying on the MRRL about page. We have “events” (posts are called events in this plugin), but we don’t have a terribly current version of PHP – which is probably causing the problem. We’ll be moving the site to a new server, which does have a new version of PHP, soon, so I’ll hold off on updating PHP on the old server…
Anyway – once I get it working, it will be a very cool tool for me to use to display all the information and inanities that I post to my social networks, and it will be a nice way to create a page that mimics FriendFeed’s lifestream, but is available to everyone – not just other FriendFeeders.
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