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!