First off I just want to say that I think this is probably NOT a very good idea, but I downloaded the Timelope extension for firefox today, that basically publishes every single webpage you visit to timelope.com and as an rss.
Smart? No, maybe not, but kind of fun!
Whyyy!
Some people would probably say that publishing every singe page you visit on the web as kind of overkill, and also a sliiiiight security nightmare, and both are probably correct, but is just so darn cool to have!
On a more serious note: It is also a good reminder of just how much information you leave behind while surfing. Perhaps you can even change some habits? Think: If it aint safe to show on the web for all to see, then perhaps it’s not very good for your brain eighter!
Good control over what to display
Timelope has a lot of options to make it easy to control what people see:
- You can choose to make everything private, and just use it as a log for yourself.
- By default localhost and all visits to urls starting with https:// is hidden (that means online banking and alle secure logons)
- You can create a whitelist consisting of sites you want to display.
- You can create a blacklist with all the sites or parts of websites you don’t want to show (like the link to phpmyadmin, wp-admin, or just any boring site you don’t want to bother people with telling about.
- There is a convenient checkbox to hide any porn sites you visit.
- There is a small button in Firefox where you easily can turn off all publishing.
- And lastly, you can manually delete stuff that you feel clutter up your lovely stream, and you can at the same time choose hide all later visits to knitting.com or other embarrasing sites automatically.
Displaying the Timelope – feed in WordPress:
You can use the wonderful RSS Stream WordPress plugin to display you browser history.
This plugin only supports RSS 2.0, and timelope has chosen to deliver an atomfeed, so you have to fetch your timelope stream and reformat it with for instance feedburner. Log on to feedburner.com and create a new feed, paste in your feedurl from timelope (http://timelope.com/mskogly/feed), when you are done with the wizard you must turn off Smartfeed and then look for Convert Format Burner. Choose Rss 2.0 and then activate.
Then you can go into wordpress admin and insert the feed into Rss Stream, and you are set for some serious information overload fun for all.
Your lifestream will suddenly be flooded with lovely stuff like this:
Update: 26th of april 2009: Decided to turn off Timelope, because it took to much time to administrate and weed out the sites I didn’t want to show.
m.
