Five Ways to Self-Host Your Own Lifestream

One of the online rages these days is aggregating web-based social interactions in to a single entity known as a lifestream. There are a number of methods for facilitating lifestreaming – services like FriendFeed are designed to aggregate content from around the web and keep users on their site, to micro-blogging services like Tumblr which offer a mix of a service provided solution with customization, to self-hosted lifestream blogs offering complete. In this article the TechMiso Chefs show you five ways to self-host your own lifestream.

Why would you want to host your own lifestream rather than allow Tumblr or FriendFeed to do the job? In the case of the latter, even though FriendFeed is an exceptional service you are still tied to the way they present the information. There are absolutely no customization capabilities whatsoever, so if you wanted to wrap the output in a sexy web design then you are mostly out of luck.

Tumblr is a great example of a service which offers the ability to lifestream while retaining the ability to customize. Again, while Tumblr is a lovely service, it is not without issue. The main gripe I have with Tumblr is the five-feed import limit – what this means is you are limited to aggregating data from only five sources. If you interact on more than five sites and want to combine that data in your lifestream then you are mostly out of luck.

Self-hosted lifestreaming has none of these issues, but it too is not without some issues. Do not think self-hosted is the holy grail of lifestreaming! While you will have complete control over the amount of feeds imported and the presentation of those feeds, the learning curve is far steeper than either FriendFeed or Tumblr. Designing your own lifestream theme might be loads of fun but it will take a lot of time to tweak before the design is just right.

Bottom line is that although self-hosted is a little more difficult than using a service provider, we are much more comfortable being in control of our destiny. The amount of features with a self-hosted lifestream far outweighs any available through a web-based service.

With the semantics out of the way, here are five ways to self-host your very own lifestream:

• SweetCron is billed as “the automated lifestream blog software” and that is not far from the truth. The software is very blog-centric but has the extraordinary ability to import data from a variety of sources. SweetCron is capable of using custom themes and is based on CodeIgniter, so is also quite extensible if you are familiar with PHP. SweetCron does not offer built-in commenting but does work with Disqus.
• Use WordPress as Tumblr-like Tumblelog – WordPress is more than capable of acting as a lifestream, essentially replicating the Tumblr feed import functionality. This method is close to our very own hearts seeing as we wrote the simple HOWTO. Since WordPress is already quite mature and feature rich, our method offers all the goodies that WordPress has to offer while allowing for the presentation of a lifestream using a custom theme of your choice. It’s all about control and customization!
• RSS Stream is a WordPress plug-in designed to make displaying a lifestream as simplistic as possible. Since it relies upon WordPress there is almost no work to get it up and running. Drop in the plug-in, create a new WordPress page and you are suddenly lifestreaming. The one major con to using RSS Stream is the data is not imported in to WordPress, instead being dynamically pulled and collated each time the page is visited. If you are yearning for something to archive your online follies then this might not be what you are looking for.
• WP-Profilactic is another WordPress plug-in designed for lifestreaming, this time instead relying on the aggregated online activity feed from the web-based Profilactic service. While the plug-in is not a bad idea, as with the previous two, it does not store data in WordPress but merely syndicates data on each page load.
• WP Lifestream is one more of the many WordPress plug-ins for lifestreaming, but this time the data is actually stored in WordPress and thus archived. One of this plug-ins strong points is the developer had extensibility in mind when creating it, thus the plug-in has the ability to be added upon quite easily. Desire a new feed type that is not available out the box? Simply fire up your code editor and bake your own!

Of the five services listed, the TechMiso Sous Chef’s recommend either Sweetcron or our very own method for rolling a WordPress tumblelog. Sweetcron is definitely the easiest to setup while WordPress offers the most options and feature rich lifestream.

So there you have it – five fairly simple methods for self-hosting your very own lifestream. After all, self-hosting is a whole lot more fun, offers far more control over the data and allows you to custom design your very own way to present the aggregated content to your viewers. What more could you possibly ask for?