A Great Social Stream Plugin

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Off and on for a number of years, I have looked for a WordPress widget that could display my public activity from Twitter, Google+ and YouTube on my blog. I had used Twitter Widget Pro with great success with Twitter, but I wanted something that worked with other social networks.  I tried a number of different plugins and services, including FriendFeed, Lifestream and several Google+ specific plugins, but none worked quite the way I wanted.

On my last search attempt, I found an article by Charnita Fance at ManageWP that finally pointed me to one I like: WordPress Social Stream by Design Chemical.  It works with plain RSS feeds and 14 different social networks, including Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.  Besides just text, it can also insert thumbnails from your posts.

The plugin is fully customizable, including choosing your social networks, height of the stream and scroll speed.  You can customize the text using custom CSS.  If you want a full page, you can create a Pinterest-style social media wall.  The plugin also lets you create multiple different streams for different purposes on your WordPress site.

The plugin costs $14 at CodeCanyon.  After all of the frustration I had with free plugins that didn’t do what I wanted or just didn’t work, the price was worth it.

I only had one issue with installation.  I could not get my Tumblr stream to display.  I contacted the developer and had a code fix by the end of the day!

I’ve put a full-sized screen shot of a social stream below this article.  For a live version, just look to your right on this page!

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