A while ago I built a Jabber presence indicator on my personal web page by customizing one of the examples provided with class.jabber.php. I have received enthusiastic feedback from a handful of users – that makes me feel warm inside ! Do not neglect the ego of people who provide free services, be they Free software developpers or volunteers for anything : a kind comment or a nice stroke in the right direction go a long way toward feeding their motivation. So next time you enjoy the produce of the gift economy be sure to let people know how much you liked it !

With the kind words came a question which made me aware that a newcomer may not find the required configuration as obvious as I do. One of the least obvious steps is telling the script whose status it is supposed to check. Don’t look for a JID parameter inside the presence indicator script : the presence indicator script itself knows nothing about the user whose status it checks. It is the watcher bot user that has the watched user on his roster. The presence indicator script will return the status of anyone on the watcher bot user’s roster. That makes it quite flexible because it will work for any number of users.

If anything remains unclear to you, please be sure to report it to me.