I now rely on Jabber to publish my presence. Not everyone has a Jabber client at hand but Web access is about ubiquitous so it makes sense to me to make my presence available on a Web page. To me this is a personnal itch and an excuse to practice some PHP and learn a little about the exciting world of XMPP.

The source code for my presence indicator is now available for whoever wants it. It is made possible by class.jabber.php, a Jabber library for PHP. I customized one of the examples provided with class.jabber.php. It has many rough edges such as the user’s name sprinkled across the markup code instead of being a proper parameter, or the page’s presence being sent to the polled account instead of being hidden. And it is quite slow because it queries at load time. But I like it better than the example packaged with class.jabber.php.

It basically does the job and I am therefore quite sure that there will be interested users. So this is the “early” part of “Release Early, Release Often”. Take that hack, customize it, tweak it and generally improve it… And most of all please report back somewhere so that everyone can benefit. Here would be a good start.