20:06
I registered this domain last year, but I haven't had a chance to do anything with it until now. My experiences developing Gwibber have given me an appreciation for the expressiveness of activity streams, so it seemed logical to adopt that format for my personal web site.
My previous web site had a relatively crude activity stream system that I developed myself with Python and Mako, but I wanted something more refined for the new site. I found a nice Wordpress plugin and a few other options, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with any of the solutions that I explored. When I was catching up on some reading, I ran across a blog post by Ian Forrester about Storytlr, a lifestream platform that was recently released to the public under the open source Apache license. The Storytlr web service is shutting down, but users can now run it themselves on their own servers.
I remember looking at Storytlr last year when I read about it on Ars, but I never previously considered using it because it didn't have developer APIs and couldn't be self-hosted. Now that it's open source and can be installed anywhere, it seems like a reasonable choice for my new site.
It was easy to install Storytlr on my Dreamhost account. The code is relatively simple and easy to customize. I configured it to track my social web activity and my articles from Ars Technica. I also coded a new service module for it to add support for ScrnShots, a screenshot image hosting service. The only problem I ran into during the initial setup process for Storytlr is that the RSS handler requires PHP5-Tidy module, which isn't available on Dreamhost. I was able to work around the dependency by making a few minor adjustments to the relevant code.
I chose a simple visual theme, but I boosted the aesthetic quality by using Tango icons. The social network Tango icons come from the excellent Breakdance Project, which I have been using in Gwibber.
I've been pretty happy with Storytlr so far, but there are a few features that I want to add. I'd really like to have it track my Launchpad activity and a few other things. I'd also like to have a web API so that I can manage it from a desktop application.
Update: My article about Storytlr has been published on Ars Technica with additional details. I've also submitted the code for my ScrnShots plugin to the Storytlr developers.