Custom Lifestream Display

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asphericlens/
February 15th, 2010
|
Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s especially true for software.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to display my lifestream as a single page (and on my own domain) in a way I could customize to match my own aesthetics. I tried Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few custom scripts for pulling data from Friendfeed. Everything was either too complex or lacked the ability to customize the way I wanted. For a while, I had been collecting my lifestream events using the Lifestream Plugin for WordPress and was really impressed in it’s stability and functionality. I wanted to display this data but outside of my WordPress installation, so I decided some PHP was necessary.

Custom Lifestream Display

Custom Lifestream

The source is located over here on github. It’s a simple set of PHP files that uses the lifestream data from the Lifestream Plugin in your WordPress database and renders it grouped by event type.

A live demo (my lifestream) can be found at www.markphilpot.net

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

Installation

Very simple: Create a config.php file in the include directory that includes the necessary variables (See README) and customize feeds.php to point to all the correct feed IDs for your installation.

Known Issues

If you used a different prefix for your WP installation, you may need to update the tables in the queries.

There is some logic in content.php that may be particular to my feed set (logic to eliminate duplicate entries for example).

I’ve used a very minimalistic design, but it should be fairly simple to customize the CSS. If you find any problems or identify any neat features, please file an issue at github or send me a patch.

Photo By asphericlens

Tags: , , ,

  • Pingback: Custom PHP Lifestream Script Built Atop Wordpress Plugin | Lifestream Blog

  • http://www.dossierstudio.com Chesley

    Hi,

    I was wondering if you knew how I could get the basic wp-lifestream plugin to show flickr thumbnails, instead of just linking off to flickr? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

    Thank you,
    Chesley

  • http://www.mcstudios.net Mark

    I know that flickr recently changed their RSS format (I had to make a corresponding change in my code to change where it looked for the thumbnail). I’ll take a look at the flickr extension tonight to see if it’s straight forward to update where it finds the thumbnail.

  • Pingback: What is the best client to integrate all the social media streams (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr)? - Quora

  • http://www.firehole.us Len Hardy

    Hey Mark – I just came upon your custom Lifestream code. Can you explain a little bit more how to customize the IDs in feeds.php? I don’t see where the IDs are set in that file, it looks like they might be pulled from the Lifestream DBs, but I’m unclear what needs to be modified.

    If you can email back that would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks, Len

  • http://www.brentpeters.me/ Brent Peters

    Hey Mark, I’m having some trouble with your script. I have it running in a subfolder, and connected to my main wp database. I get the error “This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test”

  • Anonymous

    That comes up when the script fails to connect to the database.  Did you create a config.php file in the include directory?

    It should look something like:

    $host = “localhost”;
    $database = “blog”;
    $user = “username”;
    $pass = “password”;

    wrapped in php tags.

  • http://www.brentpeters.me/ Brent Peters

    Still not working for me. I verified the SQL information I’m using with another script, and it is valid.

    I’m using godaddy, so my SQL host is not localhost. Is your script compatible with remote hosts?

Twitter Facebook Flickr