Archive for Tag ‘lifestream‘

Warning: Don’t Run Lifestream and WPBook at the same time

Quick warning: don’t run WPBook with the latest version (0.99.9.8-BETA) of the Lifestream plugin. Bad things will happen.

An updated version of the prohibition on burning the candle at both ends

Here’s why it’s important to test plugin updates.

After my last post about beta testers for WPBook, I decided to go update my other plugins which had updates available, including Lifestream, which had an update to 0.99.9.8-BETA from 0.99.6 available.

So I jumped in without really doing any investigating of what changes there were – bad idea.

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Lifestreaming: Open Source Platforms and Hosted Options

For a while now I’ve been testing out a few lifestreaming platform options. My current shortlist includes four open source approaches / platforms and two hosted offerings.

I think ultimately I’ll want to keep an open source (LAMP) platform because I want to own the data in my lifestream, have backups of it, and be able to move it around as I please. This leaves me choosing between a platform linked to a blog (WordPress or MovableType) or a standalone one (Sweetcron, Storytlr or similar) that just powers the lifestream. Originally I created JohnEckman.com as a standalone lifestream, thinking that the various blogs I wrote for around the web could be aggregated there – but there’s no reason why that couldn’t be a WordPress install as well.

Anyway, what follows are my notes / first impressions – not an exhaustive evaluation certainly but a good shortlist to start with if you’re thinking of running a lifestream.


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Online Identity Management

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of online identity management: what it means to have an identity online, what stays consistent with the offline world, what becomes more fluid, and what becomes more fixed.

It’s a very vibrant space right now, with commercial vendors, open source projects, trends, and standards all vying for attention. I’m thinking here of a couple of overlapping categories:

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BrightKite, FireEagle, and Airports

I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading. ;)

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TripIt Traveler Profiles, Action Stream

(Via the TripIt blog)

TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:

The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.

It’s got a nice, RESTful public url – mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin – the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.

You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone – but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link – just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).