Version 10.3: The Lifestream

You may have noticed that I’ve adapted my pop­u­lar ver­sion 10 lay­out into a lifestream¹. I quite enjoy the con­cept of the lifestream, where you can see a person’s lat­est activ­ity that’s up-to-date by the minute. A change like this means a bump up to a full sub-version num­ber, 10.3

The key to all of this is my new iPhone 3GS. The tech­nol­ogy has roughly caught up to my needs, so I decided to get one this year. Apple tends to announce new iPhone gen­er­a­tions every sum­mer, which means I’ve been plan­ning this design update for months now.

So with this fancy new iPhone I can write tweets on-the-go, stay up-to-date on the peo­ple I fol­low, and check my @replies, all with the Tweetie appli­ca­tion². I once had my tweets inte­grated into the blog, but decided not to stick with this because the fre­quency with which I use twit­ter meant that the sheer num­ber of tweets was flood­ing my RSS feed. Then one day, the real­iza­tion dawned on me to exclude that one cat­e­gory from my feed, et voila! A sim­ple workaround that lets peo­ple sub­scribe to my twit­ter stream if they so choose.

I can also take pic­tures with the built-in iPhone cam­era and e-mail them to Flickr directly from the phone, which will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a WordPress post and embed the pic­ture in the entry³. And coin­ci­den­tally enough, the max­i­mum width for images posted to Flickr is 500 pix­els, which hap­pens to be exactly how wide the main col­umn of my blog is. It’s like it was meant to be.

So there are two new cat­e­gories: one for tweets, and one for snaps. Both of them dis­play with CSS styling unique to each cat­e­gory and an icon to denote the type of post. A note on the “snaps” icon; I tried to find some­thing that would rep­re­sent both a cam­era and an iPhone, because the iPhone isn’t a pure cam­era, nor is it just a phone. I decided to use the cam­era app icon built into the iPhone, which says both. There are no com­ments allowed on these entries because I don’t care for dis­cus­sion on such fleet­ing things. If some­one really wanted to com­ment, they could post a reply through twit­ter, or a com­ment through Flickr.

So unlike most other life streams, this blog is not exactly an aggre­ga­tor of var­i­ous ser­vice feeds because there’s a unique WordPress blog entry cre­ated for every one of my Flickr posts and tweets as well, each one retrieved from within the WordPress loop. I did this to retain a lit­tle inde­pen­dence from ser­vices like Flickr or twit­ter; if I ever chose not to use them any­more, my blog won’t explode into a ball of fire with all the miss­ing entries.

With all of this snazzy inte­gra­tion in place, I can post things quickly and on-the-fly, as long as I have inter­net access. Which is almost any­where, now that I have a 3G data plan. Version 10.3 is a reflec­tion of that.

With my ever increas­ingly busy life, the abil­ity to post snip­pets of things comes as a wel­come change to my reg­u­lar entries, which often take days to write.

1. If you’re see­ing some strange ren­der­ing issues, they’ll prob­a­bly clear up if you refresh the page. [↑]
2. This also helps me avoid text mes­sag­ing charges, which is how I wrote tweets before, when I was out in the real world with no inter­net access, though my new data plan has unlim­ited texts any­way. [↑]
3. In an ideal world, I could send the pic­ture to a WordPress e-mail address or post it using the iPhone WordPress appli­ca­tion, but the post-by-email option of the for­mer doesn’t allow attach­ments, and the lat­ter has very crude image upload­ing options with only one set width avail­able for resiz­ing. [↑]