The Egg Man

I don’t normally blog about IRC, I figure if you are interested in it you are there. If you’re not, you don’t want to hear about it. But I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out a fairly easy to configure and light weight bot that’ll post RSS feeds into my IRC Channel. It turns out no such solution exists, all IRC Bots can do many different things and vary in complexity. I gave the good old Eggdrop IRC Bot a try, but it seems like this bot hasn’t been updated sense I used it several years back. It is still a major pain in the rear to setup. However, I’ve been told once they’re configured properly (if you have the several hours to sit there and debug it), they do run forever. However, I do not have such the paitence anymore, especially tinkering around with a codebase that lacks proper SSL and IPv6 support. After tinkering around with the Eggdrop for about an hour, I gave up on it. Then I crawled back to what I currently run Gozerbot, went to the website as I was going to report my problems with RSS feeds to the Author.. Just to find out the project had been disbanded.

However, this story has a happy ending like most of them do. Yes, Gozerbot as a standalone IRC bot has been discontinued, but the Author is working on a new bot that can communicate over XMPP, IRC and it can use GAE. While its still in ALPHA stages, it works well for what I need RSS feeds, and its not to hard to configure them (just one command)! And in addition to RSS, I can have the bot forward blips from Wave, or other conversations over XMPP.