Lifestream

Sweetcron - A Self Hosted Lifestream

Yesterday Yong Fook released Sweetcron, the much anticipated self hosted lifestream.

By self hosted, I mean that you have to have access to your own server or webhost that is running PHP and MySQL. If you have ever installed Wordpress, you can install Sweetcron. The only part that is a little more complicated was that the .htaccess file included with the installation needs to be edited if you aren’t installing Sweetcron at the root level of your server. In other words, if you install Sweetcron in a subdirectory called ‘lifestream’, you will need to edit this folder. On my first attempt, I did not edit the .htaccess file correctly and Sweetcron would not load. This problem, however, was quickly resolved.

What is nice about it being self hosted is that all of the feed data is stored in a database creating a lifestream archive for you. With some programming knowledge you can also be more creative and pull the data to your lifestream in unique ways.

The installation instructions are adequate and are available on the Sweetcron google code wiki so I’m not going to repeat them.

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My Timelines - Cut and Paste Timelines for Blog

My Timelines allows you to create an Ajax based interactive timeline, from almost any RSS feed, that can be embedded on your website.

1. Input the RSS feed
2. Set the display style, font, width and height

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Categories : Article | Lifestream | Project

Swurl My Online Activities

Swurl is another online aggregator of online activity. This visual lifestream pulls in information from delicious, flickr, yourtube, twitter, flickr and a number of other services. Swurl has been extensively reviewed by Lifehacker, ReadWriteWeb, Lifestream Blog, and Ars Technica so I’m not going to go into all the details here.

Out of the many services of this type popping up lately, Swurl is one of my favorites. My favorite feature is the timeline. It places your online activity in a calendar view, which reminds me of the tumblr archive, and goes back as far as your data does. continue

Embeddable Friendfeed Lifestream Widget

Arvind Narayanan has created a utility to create an friendfeed widget for your website. The widget does not include your friends on friendfeed but just your own personal feed, which is why it is best used for a personal lifestream.

The configuration has a couple of options, such as title, background color, width and height, and then simply inputting your username will create the embed code. You can preview the result and make adjustments if necessary.

The following is the widget that I created.

Shared Netvibes Page as Lifestream

Using Netvibes
Netvibes has many different uses with the most common being a customized start page and as an RSS reader. I used Netvibes as both for quite some time. I started using it consistently in late 2005 when I started working for my previous employer because it wasn’t blocked by WebSense . Since Netvibes has tabs that can be used to organize information, my first tab was my start page and contained widgets for things like my local weather and my email. I then organized my favorite RSS feeds onto different tabs by topic; tech, linux, books, daily, etc. In the last 6 months, however, I stopped using Netvibes as a feed reader and am now completely using GReader. I don’t really use Netvibes as a start page anymore either - I open up GMail, GReader, Twitter and this website in tabs and am usually ready to get to work.

Why I Stopped Using It

Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that I don’t like Netvibes. I do like it, I like it very much. My work habits, however, have changed making it less useful to me. Since I open the sites I want to start the day with in Firefox tabs, I don’t need a startpage and since discovering GReader’s listview (for some reason I always had it on expanded view and didn’t think it was a useful feed reader) and it’s sharing feature, I have found it the most efficient and most social way to read my rss feeds. The most recent version of Netvibes also has a sharing feature but I have not warmed up to it - the shared items go into the “stream” but are not searchable or easy to scan through. And Netvibes is definitely not an efficient way for me to read my feeds anymore. You can only have a set number for each feed and if you get behind you will lose that information. For example, the Joystiq feed was limited to 40 items. It is not infrequent for Joystiq to have more than 40 posts in one day and if I didn’t get a chance to read the feed I wouldn’t see the articles. GReader on the other hand, stores all of the data - even the data for the feed items that you have already read. As a research and information tool this is indispensable.

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Streaming the Minutia of My Life

Offline Planner Stream

I have been recording the trivial details of my day to day life since 1991. Every year I buy a day planner that I use to record the little things that I do each day. I don’t use the planner to schedule appointments or as a hip journal, but instead record the mundane events that occur. For example, today’s entry would say:

tired. didn’t get enough sleep. alex to zoes’. home for hour. work - not very motivated. tired and grey, rainy day. spent time with jim. home made yummy dinner. dishes with alex. read. bed. worked on website.

Often I mention what I read, what I watched, or what game I played. If I exercised, I record for how long and what type. I also use codes for special days, the start of my cycle, and sex.

My record is dull and is certainly never going to be published but is something that I feel compelled to do. Time slips away and memory is so elastic that this record creates some permanence. I can read the planner and discover what I did on August 11, 1997 and how I felt on my 31st birthday.

Mary Shelley’s Journal Stream

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, kept very similar records in her journal. It is unbearable to read because of the abbreviations she used and because overall it is sleep-inducing.

She did, however, record what she was reading, which assists academics in determing what works influenced her novels. But like me she was recording the trivialities of her daily routine. An entry from May 1815 reads:

“Monday 8th - Go out with Shelley to Mrs Knapp-not at home-buy Shelley a pencil case-return at one-read Spencer-Go with Shelley again to Mrs. Knapp-she cannot take Clary-read Spencer after dinner Clary goes out with Shelley-walk with Jefferson–write to Marshall-Read Spencer-(Canto II) they return at eight-very tired-got to bed early-Jefferson-scolds” from The Journals of Mary Shelley. ed by Paula R. Feldman

Recently, as I began researching Lifestreaming, continue