Lifestream – Automatic Updates (finally!)

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June 19th, 2008

Quick update on my custom lifestream project – I finally got the automatic updates working.  After months of manually updates, and big lags/gaps in between updates, the automatic process is now working.  The logic of my update script was all correct, which is why the problem was so hard to spot.  It turned out that the issue came down to timezones.  The PHP and MySQL instances were set to different timezones by default, which caused all the date comparisons to be off.  Now that this is fixed, I have the script running as a batch process to check for updates every hour.

As a sidenote, another way I could have implemented  the lifestream would be to pull the RSS feeds from each site every time it is loaded.  I decided against this approach for the rather obvious performance benefit of caching the feeds locally, as well as maintaining the history of the feeds.

I hope to make a few more updates to the lifestream project soon to try to finish the next development cycle/iteration – v1.0.  Stay tuned…