This blog has had many faces, many designs and many content variations over time. At the heart however of all the changes has been my belief that this should be my playground where I experiment with formats and designs. The latest incarnation is very much about this. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the range of places I interact socially and wanted this to be the one central point for all my interactions. As a result I started looking at the concept of lifestreaming and from that socialstreaming.
The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe “…a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents — papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists. Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams.” – Wikipedia
Blogging in different lengths
Over time it’s become clear to me that I have 3 types of blogging I do on a regular basis:
I was doing these in a variety of places from Twitter and Tumblr through to writing on other blogs rather than my own. My own actually was becoming seriously neglected and whilst I did Twitter posts I was doing on other blogs I certainly wasn’t linking from my own.
A while ago I started again with my content on this blog with the aim of reposting some articles I had written with my current take on them. In the current blog format there was no method of featuring these which was going to be something I wanted to do.
One thing was clear, I knew I didn’t want to give up Tumblr or Twitter. For me, both of these have their merits and whilst some may point to the data loss or the fragmentation I don’t think if there is a filter this becomes a problem. That was the very thing I was missing though – the filter. This wasn’t going to require a one stop solution, it was going to require more of a filtering point.
BuddyPress comes into focus
My work with BuddyPress threw a different light on this problem. What if the activity stream in BuddyPress became my filter specifically for my announcement, other site posts and own posts? What if I create a profile page on my own blog? As I looked into this it became clear to me this was going to be the right solution. Whilst it also was perhaps in many respects a kitchen sink one it would give me room to develop which was also something I wanted to have.
So, I set about exploring how I wanted the front page to be. I wanted to keep the distinct areas of my socialstream that was important to me. I wanted though to create featuring methods and also to transfer announcements into activity status posts from BuddyPress. It just seemed a logical translation to me and very early on became apparent I was using them.
Designing my own conversation
I really want to write another post about how I came up and worked with this design, but I can’t really do an announcement post without touching on some of the design process. My priority was to create something that wasn’t really ‘smells like BuddyPress’. I was going to be using elements of it so that to me is what my design should have. I wanted some very clear design motifs like the speech bubbles and was firm with myself about a responsive design. In the end I do see the design as something that will evolve over time, I think it had to be a more fluid approach to give me room to not just redesign but refine. That way I can really grow into the design.
A work in progress is always the case
Lets face it as a designer you’re never quite done with your own work and I’m up front admitting that with this version. I want to build on the front page and also the profile page over time. But, I wanted to also get this out there and start using it because that truly will be the test of this social streaming experiment.
I don’t consider this truly a social stream yet but it’s my take on it. This is about making blogging work for me again and so far it’s doing exactly that. I invite you to explore the new front page and the profile page and join me in this next phase of blogging.