Will it script?

Life streams are an interesting concept. They reflect your entire life on the Internet, gathered in a single chronological flow. I used to have one as my personal blog, powered by Storytlr. A couple of years ago they stopped hosting and instead open sourced their code instead (which can be found here). For a while I tried using this, customizing it to get the look and feel I wanted, running on my personal server. Needless to say, after some time it became tedious to keep up with security updates.

So, I decided to try something else. Tumblr, which hosts this site amongst many others, has much to offer when it comes to customizability. This, paired with the excellent service ifttt seemed like a perfect match. The idea was to let Tumblr serve the content and manage back end updates, and let ifttt populate the stream with its content.

Prerequisites:

A. A Tumblr account B. A ifttt account

Theming Tumblr is easy. If you don’t have the time to make your own there are a bunch of great themes avaliable in their theme garden (which I used). Setting up ifttt is easy as well; quite quickly I got my first channels up and running, and Twitter, Readability, Instagram and last.fm started populating my feed. Problems started when I wanted to add certain services like Instapaper or Delicious. These channels require that you enter you username and password, something I don’t feel confident with.

So, for now it is a decent solution, if you don’t plan on using all channels (or don’t care about giving out your password). I on the other hand will keep searching for a better solution.