This week I have some WordPress info, a lifestreaming theme, and some cheese.

If you are a friend of mine on Facebook, you will have read some good comedy about my recent attempts at dating. Let me know if you would like me to write an article about it ;-)

• 10 WordPress Howto’s Here are 10 links to different things you can do with WordPress, such as displaying latest posts by category archive and highlighting search terms using jquery. I was excited to discover that one of my articles was #9; list latest posts from a certain category!
• Lifestream Theme Released by Press 75 – If you use WordPress and are interested in lifestreaming, a new theme has been released that is specifically for Lifestreaming.
• How to Detect and Fix the Latest WordPress Attack – At the tail end of my vacation there was a major WordPress attack that caused users to need to correct the problem and upgrade to 2.8.4. Since I was on vacation, I wasn’t aware of the problem at first. I then started getting a lot of requests for assistance and also discovered that the awesome Vered of MomGrind linked to me in the comments. If you haven’t upgraded to 2.8.4, the time is now!
• I discovered Richard Cheese during my vacation. He takes popular songs and sings them Vegas lounge style. The video quality isn’t great but the music cracks me up.
  

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(Anti) Social-Lists 9/13/09

Recently I’ve listed Simple WordPress Themes and Ugly WordPress Themes. Today I thought I would list those that have something different about them – some sort of unique feature.

I hope you enjoy them. Let me know if you like any of them. Or let me know if you hate them all.

Simple Paper – This theme has a simple and clean look – it could easily be listed on the Simple Themes lists. What is unique about this theme is the navigation on the top left rather than at the top of the page. The striped background is also different and has a masculine look to it.

Infinity – This theme contains a variety of very different elements that pull together and somehow work. The header remind me of a jungle or nature or even the Monkey Island game series. The main content area is a dark magazine style theme, there are photos in the footer and then the very bottom section looks like an office or desk. It would seem like the different areas would clash but the theme seems to work. I don’t think I would use – I can’t actually think of a use for it but I still like the look of this unique theme.

Agregado – The unique feature of Agregado is the built in lifestreaming feature and contact form. The small menu in the top right that contains the search and RSS feed is different too. I’m not fond of the darkness of this theme but I do like the features contained within it.

Color Paper – The torn paper look with the wooden style background is different. On the left of the featured content area are little color blocks. If you click on them it changes the color of the links and the Read More buttons.

Simplix – Simplix features twitter integration, four styles to choose from and custom widgets for banner ads. There is page based navigation at the top and category navigation on the top left. The last twitter tweet is shown at the top of the page and an entire page is dedicated to a twitter stream. This theme, however, is not free.

Facebook Lover – This theme looks just like Facebook. I don’t love Facebook enough to have my site look like it but I suppose it could be useful for a blog about Facebook.

Twitheme – A simple theme inspired by Twitter.

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7 Unique WordPress Themes

The first couple of months that I had this site I only had one visitor. Well, only one that I knew of. So many of my articles went unloved and unread.

It’s not that the articles are SO bad. Well, maybe just a little – my writing has definitely improved. It’s just that no one knew they existed. They were out there all alone floating about the Internet.

Since I’ve been highlighting articles from the past, such as 5 WordPress articles and 5 Twitter articles, I decided to showcase 5 unpopular articles. Maybe they will find a little love now.

I should note that my criteria for selecting articles were ones with no comments. It’s entirely possible that they were wildly popular and that the readers were so stunned by my brilliance that they were unable to comment.

1. Shared Netvibes Page as Lifestream – When I first started this site I thought one of my main topics was going to be lifestreaming because I’m very interested in it. I wrote a number of articles on the topic but quickly tired of it and there are others, like Mark Krynsky who are covering the topic is a more complete manner. But Netvibes as a shared lifestream? Why? Actually, I just took a look at it and it does show what I’m going online with photos, bookmarking, videos, etc so maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all.
2. Fav Thumbs – Visualize Your Delicious Bookmarks – This is a review of Fav Thumbs, which is a visual representation of Delicious Bookmarks. It’s pretty cool but I’ve never really used it and it’s slower than just searching the regular ones.
3. Time Tube by Dipity – A YouTube Timeline – I’m not sure what else to say about this one – the title basically says what it is. You can create a timeline of YouTube videos with a search, by manually entering them or with a RSS feed. I created one of Mirror’s Edge videos because that is a video game that I have been looking forward to even though I know it will frustrate me to no end. And yes, I know the game is out but the PC version isn’t being released until January.
4. Get Invited: 4 Ways to Obtain Access to Beta Sites – I’m really not sure why I even wrote articles back them – the titles provided plenty of information. For awhile last summer I was into trying out new sites so I wanted to get beta invites. I’m not so interested anymore – I’m overloaded on sites to test and really don’t have the time.
5. Wordle – Generate Word Clouds from Text, RSS, and del.icio.us This online utility allows you to generate a word cloud based on bookmark tags, an RSS feed or input text, such as lyrics to a song.

There you go. My 5 crappiest articles or perhaps my 5 articles that left all potential commenters speechless.

photo credit: kevindooley

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5 Unpopular (Anti) Social Articles

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.

Once installation is successful you will complete the installation by going to the site. In my case this was http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/sweetstream. You will login with the username and password emailed to you and then you will be in the dashboard / admin area. It will be empty and you can start setting up your lifestream by adding rss feeds under the Feeds Tab. Possible feeds are your blog, delicious bookmarks, flickr photos, youtube videos, and tumblr. The only one I tried that didn’t work was my shared items in google reader.

Yong Fook provided two videos to help you get started with the Sweetcron dashboard and for Writing a new post using the Write Tab.

Admin Panel

Write Panel

Once configuration is complete you can view your lifestream by leaving the admin area and viewing the main site. Again, this is http://yourdomain.com/directory, if not using root. Your lifestream will be using the default theme. Sweetcron comes with two themes and I’m sure people will be creating new ones. If you are familiar with CSS and can read PHP, you can edit the default theme as I have done. Below is a screenshot and by clicking on it you can view my Sweetcron Lifestream.

As you can see, I edited the header color and navigation tabs, added a screenshot of my site, added a list of my last three blog posts, and changed the link colors. I also temporarily removed the comments link as I have not yet set up comments for the lifestream.

I am planning on further customizing the theme this weekend. I am also looking into a way to completely integrate this into my current WordPress installation.

Have you tried Sweetcron? If so, please leave the link to your lifestream in the comments. Would you like to try it but aren’t sure how to do it? Feel free to ask me questions.

Additional Resources:

• Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server
• Sweetcron: Google Group
• Sweetcron: Installation Instructions

** Note: Whenever I search google for Sweetcron, googles asks me if I mean sweet corn. That is why I have a picture of corn at the beginning of the article.

photo credit: overduebook

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Sweetcron – A Self Hosted Lifestream

]]> http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/sweetcron-a-self-hosted-lifestream/feed/ 9 http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/my-timelines-cut-and-paste-timelines-for-blog/ http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/my-timelines-cut-and-paste-timelines-for-blog/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:15:27 +0000 Kim Woodbridge http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/?p=167 Post from: (Anti) Social Development

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
3. Click on the Get Code. You will see a preview of your timeline so changes can be made before copying the code.
4. There are two pieces of code. The first needs to go into the header of your html code. Basically this means anywhere before the tag.
5. The second piece of code goes where you want the timeline to be displayed
6. The timeline can be moved right and left by click holding and dragging.

**Update 8/21/08 – My timeline is currently offline. I was having an issue with the javascript slowing down my site. Hopefully, I will bring it back soon.

This timeline was created from the RSS feed from my videogame tumblr, From the Hip. Each item can be clicked and a mini pop-up box will provide more information about the entry. If you would like to view the full posting, image, or video, each pop-up box provides a link to the full entry.

A timeline could also be effectively used with the RSS feed from your own website. It would provide a visual representation of posting frequency and topics discussed.

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My Timelines – Cut and Paste Timelines for Blog

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. Mine goes back to 2001 as that is when I started using the Amazon Wishlist and apparently my oldest bookmarks are from that year. The images for videos and flick photographs show up in the timeline making it even more visual. One feature I would like is more customization for each service. For example, twitter tweets could be a particular color or delicicous bookmarks could show up with the favicon. Currently bookmarks and wishlist items say Link and the name and tweets say Status and then the text of the tweet. There needs to be something more visual to differentiate between the types.

Swurl also also you to customize your site a bit. You can add your own banner and change the background color. I would like the links to be customizable as well as my banner is green and doesn’t look as good with the blue theme of the site.

The one feature, however, that I really really want is a way to integrate the timeline with my own website. I don’t really care if it’s a plugin, widget, badge or embed code but I would love for the timeline to be accessible here. Add the ability to set the time frame, such as last week or last month, to the site integration and Swurl would be just about perfect as a lifestream.

My Swurl is available at http://kwbridge.swurl.com

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Swurl My Online Activities

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.

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Embeddable Friendfeed Lifestream Widget

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.

Netvibes as a Shared Lifestream

But since I do really like Netvibes, I started thinking about what I could use it for. One of the new features that I like is that you can create a page of feeds and widgets and then share it by giving others the URL. The rest of your data is still private but you can can choose to make some of your information public. I first tried this by making a Barack Obama news page .

This was an interesting test but since I get all of my news from Twitter and GReader it wasn’t that useful to me. The Obama news page includes YouTube videos, a Tweetscan on Obama, flickr photos and a variety of news feeds.

I then realized I could use Netvibes as a shared lifestream. As I was typing this it occured to me that perhaps this wasn’t an original idea. A quick google search led me to this article by Mark Krynsky from Feb 2007; Create a Lifestream Using Pageflakes.

At that time Mark tried Netvibes as a lifestream but decided to go with Pageflakes as it had a sharing function which Netvibes didn’t have at the time. If he were to test this again, I wonder if he would still prefer Pageflakes. Now, I am curious about Pageflakes as I have never used it – I have made a note to test this and it will definitely be in an upcoming post.

Netvibes has a number of widgets that you can add to your lifestream page; facebook, flickr, delicious, twitter, youtube, and many many more. You can also add the RSS feed for sites that they don’t have a widget for such as your blog or tumblr. Once you have finished adding your “streams” to the lifestream tab, click on the down arrow on the right side of the tab. A number of options will open but you will want the one that says Send to Universe. The tab is now public and you can share the url with your friends and family. Here is mine.

Sources on my Netvibes Lifestream

Widgets

• Facebook
• MyFlickr
• Twitter
• Pretty Delicious
• Last FM
• My Youtube Videos
• The Daily Plate (diet and calorie data)
• Netflix Queue

RSS Feeds

• (Anti) Social Development (this site)
• eleblog - my elephant news and information site
• From the Hip – my video game tumblr
• The Funny – my tumblr of things I find amusing
• Green Media – my environmental tumblr
• My YouTube Favorites
• Shared Items in Google Reader
• Stumble Upon

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Shared Netvibes Page as Lifestream

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, which is a daily record of your online activities, I realized that I had been doing this for years in my day planners just as Mary Shelley had been lifestreaming in her journals.

Mark Krynsky, in his Lifestream blog, defines lifestreaming as

… a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it.

Once defined, I found myself fascinated by the concept and researched ways to create one. It was only in the last couple of days that I realized that I’ve been “lifestreaming” offline for years and saw the connection between my day planners and Mary Shelley’s journals. In Mark Krynsky’s article, "Why You Should Be Lifestreaming", the first point states that you should do it for the benefit of others – that it’s a digital version of telling your friends what you are up to. I disagree with this because I doubt my friends find my online lifestream any more interesting than my day planners. It is too personal and is simply a new way for me to record what I am doing. My Mom may want to know when new photos have been posted of her granddaughter and may find some of my links interesting or humorous but otherwise she’s not going to find the lifestream compelling. And I highly doubt anyone else will either.

But to me, it is extremely interesting and informative. I enjoy tracking information, scheduling my time and cataloging these activities. Lifestreaming gives me the means to record and preserve my online activities in the same manner that i use my day planners to record the mundane details of my daily life.

I currently have two lifestreams on this site. They contain information such as links posted to diigo, photos uploaded to flickr and music I am listening to on last.fm. One was created with the self-hosted RSS reader, Gregarius, and the other with the WordPress plugin, RSS Stream. In part II and part III of this post, I plan to discuss how I created the lifestreams and the information that they contain.

Resources Mentioned

• The Journals of Mary Shelley
• Lifestream Blog
• Gregarius
• RSS Stream

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Streaming the Minutia of My Life