I’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, del.ico.us and friendfeed (and others) for quite some time now and, after reading this blog entry and clicking around Bwanas site a little, I found his lifestream page and decided to give it a go myself. Here’s how I did it (under WordPress)…
First we need to grab two plugins, Profilactic and SimplePie Core. SimplePie is merely an enabler and performance booster for those visiting the page, Profilactic is the plugin that does the heavy lifting…
The first step is obviously to install these plugins to your [blog_address]/wp-content/plugins/ directory
Once loaded, navigate to the plugins section of your blog admin pages and activate SimplePie Core, then Profilactic.
Of course, as with most of the social network feeds, you will need to create yet another identity on yet another website to feed this plugin. In this case, we need to register on Profilactic.com and setup all our feeds which we want to display in our ‘Lifestream’.
The signup is quick and painless and, once verified, you simply choose the service(s) and drop your username for each service, then click the appropriate ‘included / NOT in your lifestream’ link to tailor how much you plan to share. Once complete – click finish.
In my case this took awhile as a LOT of the communities looked familur and I actually do have accounts on a lot of them, but they’re not used – nice nostalga time for me and an opportunity to revist communities I’d abandoned in their early days to see how they had evolved.
Anyway, back to configuring the WordPress plugin via ‘Settings > Profilactic’ within the wp-admin pages…
It’s pretty basic, I just dropped in my Profilactic username and Pacific/Auckland as my time zone and I was done… Now to build a page to display it all. First off, we need to copy the profilactic.tpl.php from the plugin directory to the template directory you’re using.
Click ‘Write > Page’ and give your page a heading. Then scroll down to ‘Page Template’ and select ‘Profilactic’.
(Note: I had to go into ‘Design > [Theme_Name] Options’ and click ‘Store Options’ before the page templace option would display – YMMV)
And that’s it! Here’s my page.