How can I set up my own 'lifestream' site that I control?

October 21, 2008 7:20 PM

I'd like to set up a 'lifestream' on my website, logging all my online activities automatically and in real-time, similar to Friendfeed but that doesn't require me to be part of someone's idea of the perfect social network. Is this possible and if so, how?

For example, every time I comment on someone's blog, upload to Flickr, favorite a MeFi post, etc., I'd like a post to be automatically generated on my site, with a time-stamp. Ideally, the content of the post would also be mirrored on my site, so at a glance a visitor could see everything I've done on the web recently.

I know Friendfeed and other 'life-streaming' sites have similar functionality, but they all seem to be locked-in walled-garden social networks, online communities I don't want to be a part of, run by people I don't know working at companies I frankly don't trust. I want my lifestream to be one-way and output-only, and while for simplicity's sake I want to continue to use other sites like Facebook, Flickr, Youtube for entering my content, I'd like to be able to mirror that content on my own site. Is there such a system out there, web-based or even a local application, that would fit my needs?

Anonymous only because I'm not sure if I'm being very naive!

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Reblog is an rss aggregator that will allow you to collect information from all of your rss feeds and compile and display them as you see fit, on your own website. I messed with it for a while before deciding on a different approach (self-link ), but it looked pretty powerful and customizable, and there are plug-ins for several different blogging platforms. I don't think it will help with things like comments on other blogs though, since there isn't an associated feed.
posted by logic vs love at 7:34 PM on October 21, 2008

There are probably others, but check out Sweetcron. It looks like it supports the following: flickr, friendfeed, qik, twitter, seesmic, slideshare, tumblr, twitter, vimeo, youtube, and presumably anyone who pumps out an RSS of what you want.
posted by Good Brain at 7:50 PM on October 21, 2008

Another vote for Sweetcron. It's very customizable, and I know a fair number of people that really like it.
posted by deansfurniture5 at 9:56 PM on October 21, 2008

Digging Sweetcron.
posted by mnology at 11:00 PM on October 21, 2008

This is exactly what Action Streams for Movable Type were invented for. They're an open format for collecting your actions from around the web, and dozens of different web services are supported, from all the big ones (Twitter, Flickr, Delicious) to tons of smaller ones. And new services are being added all the time.

Even better, if you use Movable Type to run your blog, you can use OpenID and plugins to do things like mirroring FriendFeed comments on your blog, so if someone comments on FriendFeed it shows up on your site, too. I work with the team that makes MT, but I'm recommending Action Streams because it's free and I use it myself and it works great -- I even made my own Actions Streams to pull in links and mentions from Google News and Google Blog Search. You can grab MT with Action Streams pre-installed as a virtual machine that will run on pretty much any computer or server, and try it out to see what you think.
posted by anildash at 12:03 AM on October 22, 2008

Also: Agregado lifestream+blog for Wordpress.
posted by whycurious at 12:22 AM on October 22, 2008

I've been playing around with Sweetcron for a week or so. As far as I can tell, it only hoovers up RSS feeds (or Atom feeds). I've found a few feeds it cannot parse correctly. And of course, you need to tell it what feeds to follow. So if you leave a random comment in a blog somewhere, it will not have a way to include that unless A) that blog has some way to produce a customized RSS feed showing all comments by you; and B) You actually go to the trouble of adding that feed to Sweetcron.

Getting random blog comments into any lifestream app might be a bit of a problem. Apart from an explicitly entered feed, the only other way to get that content would be to periodically search Google or Technorati for your URL (probably the most reliable identifier) and parse the results. That should work, but many blogs mark comment URLs as 'rel="nofollow"', so that link might not be findable, though I'm not sure about that.
posted by adamrice at 7:08 AM on October 22, 2008