Tonight I finally took the chance to finish up the sidebar widgets in LifeStream, and I think everyone who’s been waiting for them will be satisfied. The widget allows you to place one or more, using the dynamic widgets feature which is in WordPress, for any supporting themes. Each widget let’s you customize the title, the number of items to display, and an optional list of feeds.
The optional list of feeds is where the real power of LifeStream comes in to play. Many people use different plugins to display their Twitter updates, their Delicious updates, and whatever else they may be doing. Before now, it was somewhat difficult for the average WordPress user to do this with LifeStream, but the ability was already there. The sidebar widget will let you replace these single-use plugins, and take it a step further.
Now if you’re like me, and you use custom HTML for your sidebar, don’t worry! You can still gain this same functionality from a small piece of code. To do this, let’s take a look at what the dynamic sidebar widget does in Lifestream:
lifestream_sidebar_widget(array( 'number_of_results'=>$options['amount'], 'feed_ids'=>$options['feeds'], 'event_total_max'=>-1, 'date_interval'=>-1, ));
We have a few options here (there are many more), which specify the number of results, an array of feed ids, the “event_total_max” (set this to 1 to hide grouped events), and date interval (-1 disables date restrictions). You can simply throw this snippet somewhere in your sidebar, and you’ll gain the same effect as you would using the dynamic sidebar.
Create a box for just your delicious links, just your tweets, or maybe combine all of your bookmarking services into their own widget. The power is yours 
Update: I iterate so quickly, that 0.81 is now available with shiny new options.
