LifeStream out, FeedWordPress in

For a while I have wanted this blog to be little more than an aggregator for some of the other thins I am working on.  I thought LifeStream would do that and it does … sort of.  LifeStream does a pretty good job of catching what is new, particularly from the Social sites (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and linking to it.  What it doesn’t do is actually display content in a way where it can be read without leaving this site.

So I have moved LifeStream over to the sidebar using the LifeStream widget and reduced the number of feeds it monitors.  In its place, I am now using FeedWordPress which is a plugin that monitors feeds and add the content as posts to this blog.  Yes, some of the content is duplicated and I am ok with that.  It allows me to have a single place where all of the content is available in one spot.

I prefer to post in content specific sites (e.g. on www.wp-SwimTeam.org) for certain projects so that material is self contained.  But at the same time, I want that material to exist in the steam of all of the other things I am doing (this blog).  So far it is working as I expected although I did end up with a category explosion when I added a couple feeds.  That took a little while to sort out.

Playing with wp LifeStream

I’ve got stuff spread all over the place and don’t have any one single location where I have everything collected in one spot.  Pictures on Flickr, nonsense on Facebook, posts on NCLTC or NCLUG, my Swim Team Plugin project … lots of stuff.

Recently I was listening to a WordPress podcast and heard a mention of a WordPress LifeStream plugin which sounded interesting.  Today I downloaded it and checked it out.  If does seem to allow setting up a whole slew of feeds into WordPress which is pretty much what I was looking for.  We’ll see how it goes.

Right now I have sticky post pinned to the top of this site – I suspect anything below it will be overshadowed although I don’t expect to post a lot to this site directly.  It is more of an attempt to aggregate all of the other stuff I do in one place.