Old Look, New Feel

After trying to figure out what to do around here I settled on ditching my old theme.

I wrote about the reasoning behid that theme here.

Now, I settled with my ‘07 theme with one big addition – the RSS Stream or LifeStream (as I like to call it).

I’m currently just using the RSS Stream plugin to pull in the feeds. The setup is very basic and instead of modifying the plugin to accept the Google Shared and Google Starred atom feeds I’m just running them through feedburner conversion. The second part of my setup was simply changing the generic feed icons to match the feed.

I’d like to do a lot more, like pull my the Google Shared –notes and links only– into posts so people can comment. Other more reasonible updates include:

  • more feeds (e.g. netflix)
  • Inline images for flickr
  • formatting the feeds better
  • styling (e.g. Twitter posts look bunched)
  • reply links. If it’s twitter, then a link for a twitter reply.
  • displaying the notes from G shared items (stretch goal)

Even with these goals I’m prepared to do nothing more for a long time. I’d prefer to post more than worry about this stuff. I wish Freind feed made it easier for us, without forcing users to ff.com.

About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

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  • Forgot to mention, I did change a few things in that stream since your comment; just an FYI.
  • I actually setup a Yahoo Pipe that makes a RSS feed for my Google notes. It's feeding twitter for posts, which seems like the more appropriate place for now. If I started pulling them in as posts I'll think about your code, otherwise I'll create a new pipe and use the feedwordpress plugin.
  • Cool. I think I prefer this version, although at first I was confused seeing the blog title inline with the rest of the stuff at the top, not realizing that the "normal" full blog posts were also listed farther down the page.

    Let me know if you want to use my code for doing the Google Reader +notes thing. It's kind of non-standard and probably not ready for public release yet, but you could be a beta tester if you wanted. It's in Ruby and it uses XML-RPC to put stuff into WP.
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