jon burrows ^3.0

As some of you may have noticed the bot has been up and down over the last week or so. I have been doing some major backend redevelopment of the system with the aim of making it more stable by utilising multiple servers to distribute both the load and also the bandwidth consumed by the bot. It certainly didn't help when the server that was hosting it decided to crash with a hard drive error taking with it the last stable version. Thus I decided to rewrite it again from scratch.

I aim to have the new version fully online within the next week.

The bot now has a way of using your own images.

To use them simply use the following URL

http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/www.domain.com_imagedir/encstring.jpg

simply change www.domain.com_imagedir to the URL that holds your images, just use _ instead of / in the URL as the bot changes all _'s to /'s

so for johndoe he would use http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/www.johndoe.com_gtalkimages/encstring.jpg and when someone looked at a page showing his status it will actually use the images from

www.johndoe.com/gtalkimages/status.jpg << see below for list of status images required.

Once your status is called from a webpage it will then locate your status and redirect it to the images that are located on your site.

The following are the minimum images you require for GTalk, other jabber server may use others.

available.jpg, unavailable.jpg, dnd.jpg, idle.jpg, away.jpg

If you find a request for another status simply create the required jpg and upload it to the directory

Cheers Jon

Thanks to [mEo] for the request to make the instructions clearer, and jakecigar for the URL idea.

Below are the styles that are currently available to use.

http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/?/encstring.jpg change ? to the number below.

1] The original.

2] Done by svpctech.

3] Another by me, inspired by customizetalk.com

4] Done by marchbox.com

5] Moded from svptech by Binaryblonde.com

7] Send the text of the status, With Link to this site.

8]

9]

10] For my use only.

11] As 7 with no link.

I have now made the alternative images work again. Sorry for the long delay,but there back now.

send 'encstring' to the bot it will return with your URL

http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/1/UNIQUEID.jpg

then simply change the /1/ for a /2/ etc. http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/2/UNIQUEID.jpg

See this post for a sample of the images. http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/default.aspx?section=GTalk&id=7

I have been thinking about sharing the Jabber Status bots that I have created.

There are really two parts to the system.

The first is the Client which is basically a application that sits listening to the status stanzas that are sent through when your status changes, that in turn is passed into a database.

The other part is the image display system, when the img src=... is called the image handler interogates the db and gets the last known status text and calls the relevant image, or builds the image and passes it back to the required browser.

I am wondering if any one would be interested in helping with hosting the image display system. Basically I am thinking of setting up subdomains that could be pointed to different people servers to utilise there images/status. ie jabsv1.jonburrows.co.uk -> Jabber Server 1 jabsv2.jonburrows.co.uk -> Jabber Server 2

It would enable people to be able to have a far wider range of images to be used as different people could simply choose any image they wanted.

It would also mean that should a server go down it won't effect everone. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Cheers Jon

I have now created a new bot address called jabberonlinestatus@jabber.org . This works in the same way as the gtalkonlinestatus bot however it is using the jabber.org gateway instead of Googles. The reason behind this is that the bot keeps getting banned for 24 hrs by Google due to the volume of stanzas that the bot is generating.

There are over 1000 users on the bot and GTALK just can't cope :( I have set up the jabberonlinestatus bot to hopefully overcome this problem.

I am going to be stopping the gtalkonlinestatus bot from accepting any more invites and would be grateful if some of you using the sytem would mind moving over from gtalkonlinestatus to jabberonlinestatus. The system will continue to work in exactly the same way as before.

Regards Jon

Google are blocking my GTALK Online Status Bot every now and again. The reason being to many stanzas sent in one day :( I am trying to figure out how to counteract this problem.

Jon

If you have Gtalk installed you can now invite and chat to what appears to be any other Jabber server out there.

This is great news, I have tried it on several Jabber servers and every one of them authenticated and became online within GTalk.

If I were Microsoft, I would start wondering how long it is going to be before the user base starts to move away from MSN and towards Jabber. For far to long the big three have had there own proprietory system in place and the only way to join them all together was via a third party client, such as Trillian. I only hope that they see sense and begin to allow communications from any system into theirs. Much as the way that E-mail became federated.

Further to my gtalk online status bot, I am also setting up a jabber online status bot. This will work in exactly the same way however I hope to spread the load across the jabber servers I hook into to hopefully stop the gtalk bot being blocked.

More info soon