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Lifestream Blog

News, tools and resources for creating a Lifestream

New Lifestream Extension for Joomla AvailableToday

If you’re not familiar with Joomla, it’s an open source content management system that is similar to Drupal. Extensions are add-ons available for it and I just came across one called Lifestream from Joomlashack that has become available.

It currently supports aggregating your data from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, and RSS feeds. They will be releasing an update within a few weeks to add Last.fm and LinkedIn. This will be the second update since the extension was released just a few weeks ago so it seems to be getting some nice attention.

Here’s a few of the features they list:

• display multiple social network feeds separately or together as an integrated stream
• display in 3 different views: tab, grid (side-by-side) or integrated
• set up your streams as a component (front page, for example) or a module (throughout your site, etc)
• add multiple accounts/users for each social network feed to create even more interesting streams
• choose between the included Light/Silver or Charcoal/Grey themes..or create your own themes!
• add custom formatting to each of your streams for infinite style possibilities

The extension does cost $24 but includes future updates and support. below is an overview video and you can visit the product page here.

4 Ways to Backup Your Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Media Accounts DataAugust 27

A common thread I’ve heard by people who use social media services are the concerns of how to access their archived data or what could happen if the service ceased to exist. In the case of photos and videos I personally always have local versions that are usually much higher resolution than the versions I share on services and I’d recommend everyone do that. But when it comes to using a service to create original content you don’t have on your local machine such as  status updates and sharing content on Twitter or Facebook, you run into a problem.

In this case you need to find ways that you can have that data backed up locally and accessible to you if the service doesn’t archive older data or makes it difficult get it. This post covers several options that include the ability to backup Twitter, Facebook and other services as well.

Wordpress & Drupal

I personally have been using the WP Lifestream Plugin on my personal Wordpress blog for the last few years. This plugin allows me to import data from 40 services including Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and even generic RSS feeds. Once you add these services it then creates individual records for every item each time it imports data.  This in turn is then creating records for the data in your Wordpress database. I periodically will export my Wordpress MySQL database to my local machine which

The Value Proposition and Migration from Lifestream to LikestreamAugust 23

On Friday I came across this tweet from Brian Frank stating he had switched his Lifestream to a Likestream. Lifestreams normally contain a mashup of both personal content we create as well as content we find interesting that we “like” and share. I found his decision to basically remove his personal content from the equation pretty interesting, insightful, and a sign of something I’ve been paying close attention to.

Brian Frank Likestream

Over the last few months I had shifted my thoughts from the methods we aggregate and display our personal lifestream data to better ways to consume the data we are all putting out there. When I went to SXSW back in March of this year I shared my thoughts about this with many of the people I know who are developers, startups, and the like in the lifestreaming / data aggregation sector. I got a warm reception from many of the folks I spoke to about this topic and even had a discussion with Robert Scoble, Mona Nomura, and Mark Rizzn while I

Technology Review Giving Activity Streams Some LoveAugust 17

Nice post from Technology Review giving a nice plain English primer of what the Activity Streams open standard is trying to achieve. Hopefully at one point it will provide an easy way to seamlessly create lifestreams and provide unique functionality with the associated data.

From the post

The standard, known as Activity Streams, aims to solve the problem that FriendFeed–acquired by Facebook a year ago, but largely stagnant since then–was supposed to fix: bringing together what your friends are doing from all over the web. They may be posting pictures to Flickr and Picassa, microblogging at Twitter, liking things of Facebook, recommending articles at their favorite news sites, etc. It's a firehose of information that you should be able to filter intelligently–and, more importantly, add to as easily as you add a new RSS feed to your reader or a new mailing list to your email inbox.

via Technology Review: Blogs: Mims’s Bits: ‘Activity Streams’ Will Be the Glue of Your Online Life.

How to Install a SweetCron Like Theme to Your Posterous SiteJuly 20

Posterous has been adding many more themes lately to their service. A few weeks ago I noticed that Drew Olanoff had a sweet looking theme on his Posterous that reminded me of the default theme used by SweetCron. I really like how items are displayed on the home page when using that styled theme so I decided to take a look if it was a new one added to the service, and sure enough it was.

click image to visit my Posterous site

To change your current theme to this new one all you need to do is visit your Manage page and then click on “settings” and then click on the big “Theme and customize my site” button. Then scroll down to the theme titled “MyList” and select it. That’s it. You will now enjoy the look of your Posterous site in the way of a grid of pretty thumbnails displaying your posts.