Been is a minimalistic life stream archiver and aggregator. It fetches events from a set of sources, such as GitHub commits, reddit comments, and tweets, logging them in a store (couchdb or redis).
Been was designed with a companion web interface, wake, to form a simple website engine. In addition to online feeds, been can read markdown files out of a local directory or git repository, serving as the data backend of a blog website.
Been is small, general purpose, and hackable. Left its own devices, been provides a persistent and centralized store of often transient web activity. This can be useful for personal queries and statistical analysis.
The name "been" is a shortening of "where I've been" / "what I've been up to".
As I prepared to join reddit in 2010, Jeremy Edberg advised me to update my website, since I wouldn't likely find time to do so afterward. Been and wake were my attempt to make a website that would update itself in my coming absence.
Been was also inspired by David Cramer's excellent Lifestream WordPress plugin.