In the previous design of the blog I had used a feed syndication pluggin called Feed Wordpress which let you import content from RSS feeds and show them as posts in the blog. There were a few problems with this, I wanted to show information on my blog from other sites which I’d found online (particularly posts from other blogs I’d found on google reader) but also wanted to make sure that posts which were imported could not be mistaken as my own work and had to be credited to the original author.

This was partially achieved used a magazine style theme called Victoria which let me categorise posts to show in different areas. My own writing could appear completely seperate to posts which were imported.

This didn’t work out exactly as planned as various problems with importing feeds from google reader, flickr, youtube etc meant that feeds were rarely displayed in a consistent design.

This new theme lets me focus more on my own writing and content and has a distinct section for a lifestream of information from other sites. I am also in the process of redevopling my main site www.tomsteel.co.uk and I will feature more detailed lifestream content there. In the meantime I use friendfeed.com to bring together my ‘online activity’.