How-To Build A Searchable Lifestream

Much of our historical records our based off the diaries of some sort of the people who gone before us. With more and more of our lives moving online, the question of archival becomes more of a challenge. I have tried the lifestream plugin and for its stated purpose it does an excellent job. I wanted more though as I wanted to be able to search my archives and have each specific post or bookmark resolve to a specific permalink.

Here are my efforts to begin journaling my life on line. Warning, technical geekspeak ahead!

Create a category in your blog to devote to this project. I call mine “stream” to strike a balance between lifestreaming and story streaming.

Add this code to your functions.php file to exclude the posts from your front page and main rss feed.

function exclude_category($query) {
if ( $query->is_home || $query->is_feed) {
$query->set('cat', '-XXX');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Replace XXX with the category number from your lifestream category. A big thank you to Jangro.com for this tip!

Download and install Twitter Tools and FT-Facepress. When you install Twitter Tools, make sure you install the bit.ly plugin for it as well. Twitter tools will automatically tweet each of your posts and if you want, it can keep an archive of your tweets and publish a daily and/or weekly digest as well. Installing FT-Facepress will automatically update your facebook status with the title and and permalink to each of your posts.

Find the rss feed associated with your new lifestream category, at http://yoursite.tld/category/feed and run it through your rss analytics and email subscription package of choice and then add it to your subscribe page or widget.

Use the “Press This” bookmarklet which comes standard with each Wordpress installation under tools, to begin collecting content that you have interacted with around the web and publish to your lifestream category.

You now have a means of collecting and curating content important to you, with a built-in hub and spoke approach to publicizing your content. Its not Posterous, but its on your domain and you reap the SEO benefits of your research and travel across the internet while retaining full integration with the rest of your site.

Update: 11-06-09 Want to add the latest posts from your lifestream to your sidebar? You have two options. For the easiest and fastest way, something like the Category Posts Plugin is probably your best bet. Install it and set the widget to display the latest post from your lifestream category. For the more adventurous, try adding something similar to this code to your sidebar.php file.

Photo Courtesy of Retro Traveler