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I dabble with Lifestreaming, displaying activity from across multiple social media and networking site in one location, and have gone as far as to tweak a plugin to add a bunch of feeds and work just like I wanted, but it takes a lot of maintenance.  Currently my Lifestream page is down again and not displaying anything and I haven’t taken the effort to fix it. Now along comes the Lifestream WordPress plugin which is an easy way to set up a lifestream, appears to be robust and has a nice set of support resources to help maintain it.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated a whole Lifestream section is added to the WordPress right navigation bar.  On the Feeds screen you can enter all your social network activity RSS feeds.  There are 62 options available from Amazon to Yelp and with a few generic feed options for extending it further.  You can also add multiple feeds from each option which is nice if you have more than one Twitter account or something.  From each feeds set up screen there are options to adjust the feed label, icon, whether to group actions from each day and whether to show a full, partial or no excerpt.

The Settings screen lets you set a variety of universal properties such as date and time formatting, number of items in your lifestream, description length, icon styles, creation of a lifestream feed and a lifestream digest post option.

By and large I found this to be pretty easy to use and customize, though my Flickr, Amazon and Netflix feeds all had issues that I am still trying to work out completely. Luckily there are lots of resources for maintenance and support.  The Maintenance/ Debug screen is key for a quick default settings reset, cron timer reset and to check extension file locations.  You can then see all events downloaded by the plugin on the Events screen.  Finally there is an Errors screen, a change log and a link to support forums if that still doesn’t resolve your problems with the plugin.

I haven’t yet decided whether to replace my existing lifestream with this new one or not.  Check out my lifestream that I set up with the plugin or this other example and let me know what you think of the results.  Clearly it is easy to use, has great resources and is more stable, but I’m not crazy about the layout and until I can fully work out the issue with some of the feeds I won’t be fully satisfied.

UPDATE: well I worked out my issues with a few of the feeds and the SimpleLife plugin wasn’t getting support nor could I keep up with the tweaking of it, so I officially switched my lifestream to the Lifestream WordPress plugin.

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