krynsky.com » Lifestreaming http://krynsky.com eclectic mix of technology, poetry, and my ramblings Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:29:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Start of My Variation of Project 365 http://krynsky.com/the-start-of-my-variation-of-project-365/ http://krynsky.com/the-start-of-my-variation-of-project-365/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:09:35 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/?p=432 Leading up to the end of the year I heard a couple mentions of Project 365 which as far as I can tell appears to be a meme of sorts started by Photojojo whereby you create a dialy photo journal for a whole year.


John Worthington’s first Photo 365 for 2009

While this idea was intriguing to me, I don’t think it’s something I could actually stick to for a whole year. So I looked at what social media services I currently used or where available that offered a tool where I could start a similar project.

I recalled a service I wrote about last year called Daily Mugshot for Lifestream Blog. This seemed like a good service that shouldn’t be too hard to commit to. I also wanted a way to do the same in video form. 12seconds.tv offers the best form for this by not only offering an easy way to create and post the videos, but by limiting the videos to 12 seconds, also creates a low barrier to stick to by only requiring me to record short daily messages.

I plan to embed a widget for each of these services onto my site as well as pipe through the feeds to my Lifestream here as well as other services including FriendFeed. I’ll need to find a way to embed 12Seconds videos to my site based on a tag before that can happen though. Luckily I have connections over there :)

If you are currently participating in a Project 365 or variation of please post a link in the comments below. Also, if you know of other cool ways to do a Project 365 or related services which would be useful, please post them as well.

So without further ado below are my first entries for this project. Hopefully I’ll be able to stick to it for a whole year.

Daily Mugshot
- stream currently displays a few test shots from 2008. My account is here
 – RSS feed for daily shots are also available. Mine is here

12 Seconds (only embedding my first entry for now)

Project 365 – Day 1 on 12seconds.tv

]]> http://krynsky.com/the-start-of-my-variation-of-project-365/feed/ 1 Annoyed and Fixing Plugins Having Issues With My Theme http://krynsky.com/annoyed-and-fixing-plugins-having-issues-with-my-theme/ http://krynsky.com/annoyed-and-fixing-plugins-having-issues-with-my-theme/#comments Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:06:08 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/annoyed-and-fixing-plugins-having-issues-with-my-theme/ I was finally sick and tired of looking at how both my Photos and Lifestream pages were a bit broken after having moved over to my new Cleaker theme and decided to fix them. My Photos page uses the WordPress Slickr gallery plugin and my Lifestream page uses the Lifestream plugin. I’m too tired to post the fix / files tonite, but if you use these plugins and the Cleaker theme I can help you fix them.

]]> http://krynsky.com/annoyed-and-fixing-plugins-having-issues-with-my-theme/feed/ 2 Preview of a New Lifestreaming Platform Being Developed http://krynsky.com/preview-of-a-new-lifestreaming-platform-being-developed/ http://krynsky.com/preview-of-a-new-lifestreaming-platform-being-developed/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:16:24 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/preview-of-a-new-lifestreaming-platform-being-developed/ I have met quite a few new friends after writing my post on Lifestreaming and one of them was Olivier D. alias ze kat. I became intrigued with how he went about creating his Lifestream. So we started a dialog on IM about a new project he is working on which is to build a platform to allow people to create their own Lifestreams. I think this is a great idea since nobody has built a dedicated platform as of yet. Sure there is Tumblr, Suprglu, and Pageflakes. All of these sites can be used to create one, but none are really suited specifically for Lifestreaming.

So Olivier offered to create a Life-Line (Lifelog is his preferred term) page for me. I need to find out why he omitted a few of my feeds (Last.fm, Digg, Librarything), nonetheless, I was very excited to become a guinea pig for him. All he asked for was a small bio, my OPML file, a profile image, and to offer feedback. I was excited when I woke up today to find an IM from him with the url for my stream. So now that he has created my page it’s time for me to cough up my end of the bargain.

The first thing you notice is a very clean interface. The header provides the profile image, bio, and an RSS feed for the stream. Right below that is a tag cloud which is a nice touch. Missing on my page, but available on his stream, is a strip of avatars displaying recent readers from MyBlogLog. Now it gets interesting as he has provided a tabbed menu to filter the stream by type of subject matter. This is a great feature that allows followers to quickly jump to specific sections which I had mentioned would be a great feature that is lacking on other streams. Each tab also lists the number of items available. You can also choose whether you want to display summaries for each item. The last tab “About” provides details of all the feeds that make up the Lifestream.

Below the tabs is a small calendar that shows the current and previous month broken down by day on one line with an icon showing number of items available for that day above it. By mousing over the icon with number of items you get a popup block with a summary of the items for that day. Clicking on the icon will filter results for just that day. There are also filters for day, month, and year below the calendar. You then have the ability to allow for items you click on the either open up in a new window or tab within your browser. I couldn’t get either tab or window to work in Firefox and was only able to get it to open new windows in IE7 (finally some feedback).

Below the calendar the stream is displayed based on the tabbed filter selected. When viewing “All” each item is prefixed by the type of subject matter (tab) followed by the title and an icon allowing you to mark the item as read. If you are viewing with summaries and mark an item, it then collapses to just the headline and displays with a lighter font. A problem with this is that if you view without summaries (or clicking on an item marked as read) it requires 2 clicks to open the content. If items are displaying with titles only a mouseover provides full details and thumbnail image if available.

Overall I think most of the functionality is great. I think where it lacks a bit is in design. I would like to see some color coding done in the stream headlines either by stream type or individual feed. I also like the ability to prefix each item by a mini icon identifying the feed. I’m usually more of a minimalist but for some reason I enjoy these as quick identifiers in streams. Displaying the icons would also make for a nice legend in the “About” tab. The tag cloud is nice, but it doesn’t link the tags. A search box would be helpful as well.

All of the feedback I have given is specific to the user profile. Where I think things can get interesting is functionality that bridges users based on the content within their streams. I would not like to see this type of site mirror functionality of most social networking sites. I would rather like to see dynamic functionality generated by logic on the server based on the content of each user’s stream.

I look forward to following Olivier as he continues to work on his site Life2front over the next few months.

Olivier D. alias Ze Kat – LifeLine
Mark Krynsky – LifeLine

]]> http://krynsky.com/preview-of-a-new-lifestreaming-platform-being-developed/feed/ 2 Dave Winer Showing Interest in the Lifestream Concept? http://krynsky.com/dave-winer-showing-interest-in-the-lifestream-concept/ http://krynsky.com/dave-winer-showing-interest-in-the-lifestream-concept/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:24:53 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/dave-winer-showing-interest-in-the-lifestream-concept/ Ever since I’ve become aware of the Lifestream concept I’ve been monitoring any new tidbits of information that may be released. So I came across a link to an article titled “Lifestreams could help create new personalised discovery engines” which sounded very interesting so a clicking I will go. Once there I started to read this article that was very interesting when as I started to scroll down the screen I saw the familiar MyBlogLog recent readers widget on the sidebar. So I see my mug on there and then right below me was what I would consider to be an internet Icon. It was none other than Mr. Dave Winer himself. Father of RSS among many other accolades and today was named one of the “The 50 Most Important People on the Web“. Clocking in a bit lower than I would have put him at #39 but hey…they had Tila Tequila listed at #50 so their credibility sank like a tank after I saw that.

I continued to finish the article and then was prompted to add a pretty lengthy comment as well. I then decdied to click on Dave’s avatar to take a look at what his profile looked like. I was then pretty surprised to see that he had just signed up with MyBlogLog that day. Talk about strange timing I was looking at a bare profile page and having just read the latest post on a blog about Lifestreams I felt compelled to drop a message on his page to both re-inforce the chance he was there to read it or draw attention if he hadn’t.

All in all my impulse to do this seemed pretty strange. It really felt like the equivalent of a celebrity spotting, followed by some casual stalking, only to end up with a possibly unprovoked heckle. Pretty amazing similar situations to reality that can occur on the web these days which I would have never pursued in real life, but on the Internet, I almost felt compelled to. Basically I was pretty excited at the strange string of coincidences and let them get the best of me. I just hope that Dave does have interest in some of the concepts regarding Lifestreams and that he becomes involved in helping define a standard.

]]> http://krynsky.com/dave-winer-showing-interest-in-the-lifestream-concept/feed/ 4 Create a Lifestream Using Pageflakes http://krynsky.com/create-a-lifestream-using-pageflakes/ http://krynsky.com/create-a-lifestream-using-pageflakes/#comments Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:03:50 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/create-a-lifestream-using-pageflakes/ If you haven’t already read my post on Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing , then take a look to familiar yourself with the concept. There have been a slew of Startpages that have started to really mature lately. They currently provide the best mashup platform to be used for a Lifestream. I thought it would be a good idea to provide what I believe is currently the quickest and simplest platform independent system to allow for someone to create a Lifestream they could share with others.

I didn’t select Pageflakes all willy nilly. I actually spent quite a bit of time defining a set of contenders to use, created a standard lifestream based on the one I created here on my site, and then compared each sites features and functionality. I started with the current top three contenders in the Startpage space which are Netvibes, Pageflakes, and newcomer Webwag. I’m only going to do provide a quick summary of how I used these sites to create a Lifestream and not go into the full functionality they offer. If you haven’t tried these sites though, I recommend that you do because they are great. Below are some details regarding the process and screenshots of each of the pages:

Netvibes Lifestream

Netvibes is considered the top player in the Startpage category so I thought I’d start with them. They offer a very clean and responsive design. I quickly added each custom RSS feed into its own module. There are several controls offered for each feed module including, number of items to display, title, and color. They already had existing modules for Flickr and Del.icio.us which offer some additional options the feeds don’t. After adding all of the modules I used their fancy Ajax drag and drop to align the modules the way I wanted them to appear on the page. I kept this scheme the same across all three sites for consistency.

Pageflakes Lifestream

I then moved on to Pageflakes and proceeded to go through the same process. Luckily this was pretty painless since Netvibes offered the ability to export all the modules as an OPML file which I then imported into Pageflakes. They also offer the custom modules and in addition to the Flickr and Del.icio.us ones that were provided by Netvibes, they also offered a Youtube one. So I killed the RSS feed and added that module instead which offered more functionality and details to the module. Pageflakes also offers the ability to export any module as a widget where they provide html for you to embed the content on your own site which is a nice touch. The user interface was pretty much the same as Netvibes, but what ultimately sealed the deal for Pageflakes which no other site offered was the ability to share the startpage. You can view mine here. This is of course an essential feature for creating a Lifestream and was why I selected them, but beyond the sharing I liked their feature set the most. I believe the others sites may add this ability in the future.

Webwag Lifestream

Webwag is one of the newer players and appears to be a little behind the Netvibes and Pageflakes in terms of functionality. They did not currently offer the custom modules for Flickr, Del.icio.us, or Youtube like the others offered. But I was able to import my OPML file flawlessly and if you’re looking for a more minimalistic implementation you may want to consider them.
You may be wondering why I didn’t consider using any of the big three (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft). Well I did and they were weeded out pretty fast. None of them offered competing functionality that I felt was better than Pageflakes. They also aren’t very elegant in their UI implementation and I feel are far behind the curve. Also you can’t share your page with any of them which I already stated was a nail in the coffin.

I also tried a few others including Protopage, Yourminis, Suprglu, and a few others. But none seemed to offer the features and quick ease of use as the others. I still would recommend that if Startpages are new to you, that it’s worth playing around with them as they are great and can support a large variety of uses that may be appealing to you.

You can read on about Startpages at the links below:

]]> http://krynsky.com/create-a-lifestream-using-pageflakes/feed/ 7 Netvibes Lifestream Pageflakes Lifestream Webwag Lifestream Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing? http://krynsky.com/lifestream-could-it-be-the-next-big-thing/ http://krynsky.com/lifestream-could-it-be-the-next-big-thing/#comments Sun, 18 Feb 2007 08:50:53 +0000 Mark Krynsky http://krynsky.com/lifestream-could-it-be-the-next-big-thing/ (Update: I have created Lifestreamblog.com as a resource for information moving forward)

I had already started pondering how we use so many sites on the web that stored information helping define who we are prior to writing “10 Web Widgets to Share Interests on Your Site“. That post goes into the concept of sharing information to provide insight to others and ourselves, but just adding web widgets and badges from sites isn’t a very elegant way to present the information and doesn’t offer much flexibility. I was already starting to plan the creation of a page that would provide this content in a clean fashion using RSS feeds.

The way I discovered the Lifestream concept was by clicking on the link at the top of Bharath Kumar’s site. A page titled Lifestream intrigued me as my mind made a connection with functionality behind the name. Unfortunately, beyond having a title, the page was blank. Well I’m a frequent visitor to his site since I use his 3 column K2 mod as the theme for my site. I then happened to land on this page linking his plugins and saw one titled “Lifestream Manager”. All wide eyed with excitement I quickly clicked on the link. Bah, another dead end. At that point it didn’t matter. I was a man on a mission and all I needed was a search engine and keywords to begin my quest.

After spending way too much time going off on a search result linkfest, I was able to find what appears to be the origin of Lifestreams based on this Yale project page. the implementation of the concept I was seeking though appears to have been the brainchild of Jeremy Keith. He explains his thoughts behind it in a post as well as providing the PHP script he used to create his Lifestream. Nevertheless, I was in search of a plugin for WordPress so I made my way to the Chris J Davis site. Proving how small the web makes the world, Chris was inspired to write a WordPress plugin after visiting Jeremy’s site as well as reading a post from Michael Heilemann. I’m thankful for Chris to have made the plugin available, but it’s by no means plug and play. You need to make special edits depending on which version of PHP you are using, you may need to run some feeds through a third party (like Feedburner) and the included CSS in the page template may not play nice with your theme. But still I decided to read the comments and hack away and with the help of a modified version of the code by Gunnar Hafdal and some of my own tweaks I was able to get mine up and running. I have also since seen another plugin created based on Chris’ by Elliot Back but haven’t given it a whirl yet.

Now that it finally works, all I can think of are ways to improve it, hoping it evolves and watch it proliferate across the web. After reading much of the comments from people talking about the concept you get a sense that people are very excited about the prospects of aggregating all of their info in one place for both personal activity monitoring and a central location for friends to check in. With all the different sites we use for specific purposes this makes so much sense.

The most common feature request I’ve seen is to add the ability to archive the feed content. This is particularly important for feeds that expire over time such as the last.fm recent tracks feed. The original concept was based mainly on the display of timestamped data. Adding the flexibility to organize content using categories or tags would be nice as well. Adding a legend definition in the header would be a great addition too.

With all the buzz I see surrounding Lifestreams, I think they are going to start spreading like fire. I plan to follow it’s progress as well as becoming an evangelist for them. Perhaps someone can start to design an icon standard which seems to help in the adoption much like what is being proposed for OPML and Share This.

So go out there, create a Lifestream, and share it with the world!

Directory of People’s Lifestreams

Development Efforts for Lifestreams

Popular Data Sources for Lifestreams
(keep in mind that any RSS feed can be used so that opens up quite a few interesting additions)

Lifestream Stories on the Web

Related Projects

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