How To: Creating a Life Stream
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Say you want to create a lifestream for yourself. That is, aggregate all your online activities into one page, to make it easier for people to keep up to date with what you’ve been up to (or to stalk you, like my parents… who complain I never update this blog). Sites like FriendFeed will do this for you and your friends’ activities, but sometimes it’s nice to roll your own solution and control how it’s presented. So during some of my free time, I created a simple life stream app. Here’s what I came up with. How would you do this for yourself? All you need is to setup Yahoo Pipes, and use a dash of PHP mojo.
Setting up Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is a free web service that lets you easily create mashups of content on the web. That is, it lets you remix, combine, and manipulate web feeds with a drag and drop interface. In this case, you’ll basically use Yahoo Pipes to pull down all your RSS feeds and combine them up together. Your new pipe will now output a single feed that contains everything, sorted in reverse chronological order. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that the easiest way to get started is to just clone my pipe, and modify as necessary. Yahoo Pipes makes this a pretty easy process, all you have to do is drag a couple things around and change a couple settings. Once this is done, you’ll be ready for the next step.
The PHP Mojo
Yahoo Pipes now supports serialized PHP output, which basically means it is super easy to use pipe’d data in PHP. So grab the PHP script, the stylesheet, and upload them to your own server. Be sure to modify the life stream URL at the top of the PHP to point to your own source URL. You’ll probably also want to add your own stylesheet and header / footer to match your site. Now all you need to do is to load up the script in your browser. That’s it!
Don’t have access to PHP or your own server? Yahoo Pipes also conveniently supports output in JSON and RSS.
Laity Lodge Youth Camp
Parkside Services
South Shore Baptist
Parkside Youth
Military Ministry
Campus Ministry
Know H2O
IFCJ
China Aid
C3 Missions
6 comments
any idea what this is?
Warning: fopen(lifestream.data) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/revival/public_html/stream.php on line 35
I have my own VPS.
@carl, it looks like the script is having trouble opening the cache file for writing in that directory… make sure the directory you have the script in is writable by the web server, or you can change the $cacheFile variable and have it to point to a directory that is writable by the web server.
If that doesn’t work, then you could just disable the caching logic by deleting lines 35 - 38.
Hope that helps!
Thats it bro. thanks! I tried to make a lifestream.data file and making it writable but that did not work. I just pointed the script to a directory I use for cached files and voila!
My temp location for mine is here
http://www.carlandtracey.com/carl.php
I can’t get picasa to display images and I cant figure how to mark items from my google reader feed (since the url is the original file, not google) but other than that I am pretty happy.
Thanks for the great waste of time! lol
Hey Joe, I just want to say thank you for your awesome TanTanTheme. I’ve spent the better part of my Friday afternoon mangling it to work for me. Thankfully we have the same first name, so i could skip some steps, other features not working still baffle me. i’m just chopping and cutting as i go. I love the flickr plugin, its so awesome! That kind of integration is what I was looking for in a my quest for a “is it a blog or is it a photoblog?” application. I dropped xanga about 2 years ago (just stopped blogging all together), but i’m excited to try your xanga-x-poster also.
anyways, thanks for being generous!
sure
glad someone likes it! yeah, the theme is a bit specific to my site… perhaps i will spend some time in the future making it more friendly for use on other sites… but for now, you will have to do a little bit of hacking (hey, good learning opportunity right?)
Hi, thanks for your great tutorial but the stream doesn´t work. I´ve updated everything but there is no data. Any idea?
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