Whatever spare spare time I’ve had the last couple of weeks I’ve spent trying to figure out how to make a lifestream page for this site. A lifestream is basically a page that shows as close to everything possible that a particular person has been up to on the internet. A firehose is somewhat similar.
This was tough. I first started out using Yahoo Pipes to create a feed of all my feeds. Yahoo Pipes is pretty cool, but the feed it outputs doesn’t always work and can’t be styled or easily integrated with WordPress. So I looked around a bit, and found Mark Pilgrim’s Firehose. I liked the way it looked, so I found the post explaining how he did it. Unfortunately, he’s much smarter at the internet than I am, and his solution, though it looked promising, was beyond my ken.
My next stop was MetaFilter, since I hang out there frequently and the hive mind knows all. I found a couple of good resources pointing me to other possibilities; namely Sweetcron or reBlog.
I chose sweetcron and got to work. I even found a way to integrate my WordPress theme into a sweetcron theme. This setup process was not easy and hasn’t worked completely. The sweetcron-run firehose uses my WordPress theme brilliantly, but there’s some sort of conflict engendered by the WordPress mod-rewrites in the .htaccess files, which results in the page header always displaying 404 Page Not Found. How to fix this? The aforelinked integration mentioned a few steps to take care of this issue, but in my case they didn’t work.
I dug around in the WordPress forums and found out that Apache’s mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file for WordPress has often caused this error for any non-Wordpress subdirectories on a domain. None of the suggestions mentioned in that thread worked, so I think there’s some sort of conflict between the root-level WordPress .htaccess file and the sweetcron directory .htaccess file. I might be wrong, that sort of thing is out of my depth.
However, apart from the 404 Page Not Found in the page header, the rest of the lifestream/firehose works just fine. If you really want to monitor most of my online activities (and I know there’s at least one person in the County Administration Building who does), this should make it easier for you.
Always happy to help!
that is pretty cool, adam. it is odd that it changes the title of that page and it also doesn’t recognize your favicon or do you think that is a different issue?
actually i just noticed that your favicon is not appearing in any of your ‘non-index’ pages.
The favicon stuff is probably related to the fact that I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of days. I probably have a stray quotation mark someplace that’s fouling it up.
Neat.