When I first built a my lifestream, it was a messy chunk of code and never really worked the way that I had wanted it to. First off, updating it was a huge pain and even looking at the code totally turned me off.

So after doing lots of reading about the Django web framework for Python, I decided that as a learning project, I would port my Lifestream over from PHP. I’ve never like PHP as a language, so the thought of getting to write Python code again really sparked my interest.

I must say, building a website using Django has been the most enjoyable web programming experience of my life. I now find it very hard to go back to more traditional ways of building web pages. I’m definitely looking forward to doing more projects with it.

You can check out my new lifestream here: http://lifestream.seanmcg.com/

Not only did I port my existing lifestream (http://blog.seanmcg.com/lifestream/), but I also added a bunch of new features and improvements. Here’s the rundown:

• Updated the look a bit
• Better updating functionality. The stream is updated in a background AJAX call, and new items will appear on the page after load.
• The code is much cleaner and efficient, definitely easier to update
• Full administrative backend (Thanks to Django it only took a few lines of code)
• Better aggregation of feeds and handling of timestamps.
• Added a page for each stream item
• Added an archive list so you can browse older items
• You can filter the stream based on original source (i.e. only show Flickr updates, etc)
• I made it a lot easier to add a new stream source
• You can comment on any stream item now
• Comments have email notifications built in
• I added gravatar and identicon support for the comments
• Updates to the RSS feed

The code is also totally generic, so anyone could use it on their site with minimal fuss. Maybe someday I’ll release the source if I get around to it.