I’ve been thinking about including a digest of Twitter, Delicious bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, and other social activity in my weekly review. This lets me include the information in my archive, and it gives people more opportunities to bump into things I found interesting.

It took a bit of hacking, but I eventually got the Lifestream plugin for WordPress to work, with the help of another webpage and some source code diving. Here’s the code that powers this lifestream page:

<?php
$options = array('limit' => 50);
$events = $lifestream->get_events($options);
foreach ($events as $event) {
  echo '<li>';
  $label_inst = $event->get_label_instance($options);
  if ($event->feed->options['icon_url']) {
    echo '<img src="' . $event->feed->options['icon_url'] . '" alt="(' . $event->feed->options['feed_label'] . ') \
"> ';
  }
  echo '<a href="' . $event->data[0]['link'] . '">' . $event->data[0]['title'] . '</a> (' . date('D, M j, Y', $event->data[0]['date']) . ')';
  echo '</li>';
}
?>

$event->render had been giving me problems, so I specified my own output format. It didn’t automatically pick up icon URLs, so I specified the URLs myself. (Bug: the settings get lost if you re-configure the feed.) The plugin seems to be broken out of the box, but there are enough pieces in there for a geek to make things work.

Because I don't want to use up two of my one-post-a-day slots on weekly reviews, I'm leaving it as a web page that I can review and manually copy into my weekly review post instead of automatically publishing something.

You can see it in action in last week’s review.

Work in progress. Hope this helps!