You may have noticed that I’ve adapted my popular version 10 layout into a lifestream. 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 application. 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 entry. 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.