More on "Online Status Indicator"

Last week, I blogged about an Online Status Indicator service, but I couldn't get the Jabber indicator to work. Wes Carr at 2Entwine did some research, and it turns out that the only one of the participating sites that support Jabber is the http://www.the-server.net:8000/ server.


Jabber

There's also a similar Jabber online status indicator available from here: http://mrinal.net/webber/

Here is some Open Source php code for creating a jabber presence indicator:

http://wiki.crao.net/index.php/JabberPr%E9sence/Source

Hey gang. I've been using the OPI for a couple of years now on my personal Web site. The problems with it include:

- Many of the hosted presence services provide spotty service, there being no real incentive for uptime
- Compatibility with Trillian is, as others have noted, just as iffy. (This includes the Jabber plugin.)
- Loading times vary greatly among the hosts, and throughout the day. I recommend hosting your own presence-indicating images locally.

Here's some more tips: I made some custom icons that I host myself, locally. That improves image loading times, and they're less ugly than most of the ones offered by the OPI hosts. Also, you know the default HTML you're given to embed presence in your site? There's a portion of the code that specifies image links for "unknown" presence states (the images have names like "aimunknown.gif").

I found that the OPI works better if you simply change that link to point to your "offline" image. It's less frustrating for visitors to be unsure about whether you're available (in part because most of the "unknown" icons are, at first glance, unintuitive) and to send you an IM, only to have it bounce.

Chris -

I created my own image for being "OFF" and am using that. Thanks for the advice.

- Stowe