Category: Design

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!