These Lifestream WordPress Themes Will Add Some Freshness To Your Blog
It all started with blogging. You’ve opened up a blog and you’ve shared your thought with everyone, your friends and the people you did not knew. Shortly after you got your Facebook and Twitter profiles, Flickr gallery and everyone knew what you’re listening to thanks to Last.fm.
That’s great – you have a rich online social life, but it’s pretty dispersed, right? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could still keep your blog as a center point of your social connections and feature all of your social media streams there? Luckily for you, it can be done and it’s called a lifestream.
Life On Your Social Life
Since you’re already a blogger with a web server and a WordPress system set up, you don’t have to create separate sites just to get your social activities in one place. There are a lot of great WordPress themes that will tweak your CMS and transform your blog into a nice looking lifestream. Of course, you’ll still have the option for standard blogging, but you’ll probably find it redundant with all of your social streams set up.
WP Lifestream
Let’s start with a simple plugin. WP Lifestream is a free plugin which allows you to integrate your social networks into your blog. It’s actually a simple RSS stream of your activities, however, if you’re a developer, you can integrate even more social streams in it. You can customize it easily with CSS stylesheets and it’s localization ready, so you can translate it into your own language.
Agregado WordPress Theme
Agregado is a free WordPress lifestream theme which will stream your social activities in the sidebar, and all you have to do is to get RSS streams from those social sites. Once set up, the lifestream module will start with your feed and they’ll be shown up with a carousel. Agregado comes with a functional contact form as well, so you don’t have to search for plugins that might overload your blog. If you want to create some changes in the design, the PSD file is included as well.
Varnish
Varnish is a very popular WordPress theme, with a price tag of $35. If you need a highly customizable WordPress theme, Varnish is the one for you. The three-column design is optimized for you social streams, combining your social networks and your blog on the right. Of course, everything is easily customizable within the theme options interface in the admin area of your blog. You can test out Varnish theme on Theme Forest marketplace.
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Irresistible
Irresistible is one of lifestream WordPress themes from WooThemes, a popular WordPress theme market. Its focus are your Flickr photos which is followed by your social lifestream. If you have a Vimeo or a YouTube account, you can even feature your video uploads with this theme. Of course, for those moments when you want to say more that a tweet can take, you can still publish your blog posts. This is a free theme from WooThemes, so try it out now.
I Don’t Do WordPress – Can I Have a Lifestream?
It’s too bad that you’re not a WordPress user, because you’re missing all sorts of themes and customization options. However, there’s something for you as well.
Sweetcron is a self-hosted lifestreaming open-source application which you can build themes and plugins for. You can get it on Google Code and if you need some help to set it up, Chris Coyier made a great tutorial for Sweetcron over at NetTuts.
Do you have a lifestream set up or planing one? Or is this too much public attention for you?
