stream by aspheric.lens, on Flickr

The word “lifestreaming” feels overly broad and I do a mental eye roll every time I say it, but I’ll use it for now for the sake of expediency.

So I’ve been using Flickr and Delicious forever and Twitter for a while and Google Reader and all of these services are great and let me share things in different ways. But what’s always bothered me is that these Shared Things were not only siloed off from each other, they were on sites I didn’t control. Yes, they all make it very easy to republish your stuff. I was doing that for a while with sidebar widgets for each of those services (I still have them on my Asides page, actually). But it still all felt very unconnected.

What I really wanted was to hook into the sharing functionality on those sites so that when I pushed the Share button in Google Reader, say, it would also send the item to my personal blog. That would allow me to aggregate my photos and bookmarks and tweets in one place and keep a permanent record of all of those things that is in my control.

I looked into several services (thinking I might let someone do the aggregating for me and then download the result), standalone software and plugins for WordPress. One of the better and easy to use solutions in the WordPress plugin category is Lifestream by David Cramer. It does almost everything I need except that I didn’t like the way the resulting lifestream ended up being something separate from the actual blog. I wanted my blog itself to become the lifestream.

In the standalone software category, PubWich looks very promising. But, again, I wanted something with seamless integration with WordPress.

So I ended up writing a plugin over the weekend. What it does:

• Periodically scans and downloads feeds from sources you define
• Makes a new blog post for every new item in each feed
• Blog posts can be created as new WordPress 3.0 Post Types or posted to specific categories
• Defines filters so that you can hook into each individual feed as it is being imported to tweak the content
• Saves a history of every feed

Then based on that, I created a WordPress theme that styles posts depending on the source. That’s how I display the post icons and the “View original” link with the domain of the source website, for example. Because every item becomes a blog post they inherit everything WordPress provides: they go into the feed, comments, permalinks, etc. That’s cool! (In a very nerdy way.)

So far, after one day of use, I’m very happy with it. I intend to release the plugin after I do some more work on it. Let me know if you’re interested in helping me test it.

Received my copy today of the Pro Web 2.0 Mashups book I did the technical review for. Always neat to see something you’ve worked on become real. Also, I hate writing bios like this.

Anyway, it’s an interesting book about remixing and mashing up data from multiple online services via APIs. But one of the coolest things about the book—are you ready for this?—the author, Raymond Yee, and publisher have agreed to release it under a Creative Commons Non-commercial Share-Alike license! In addition, the draft of every chapter is available online right now and the published version will be available shortly. It’s practically an open-source book.

I’ve already been paid for my work on the book but I still feel too close to it to be able to give an unbiased review. But who needs a review? Go check out the book yourself and if you like it please show your support for openness and buy a copy when it hits Amazon.