Matt Richards

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.

This is a test message.

Sometimes, you wonder. How long it will take to handle a simple task.  It can take several hours.

I know what you’re all thinking, yet another Hello world post?

Well this is because the blog has moved to another way of managing it.

Lets see, I’m going to try this new theme for a while and I think I might finally be opening up my buddy press powered website to the public in the next few weeks. Please watch this space

As you can see, I’m experimenting with new themes on this here blog. Things will be changing a lot over the next few weeks, as I move away from what I thought the purpose of this blog was when I originally set it up. Instead of following foot steps of others, its time I make my very own purpose. Much more to come..

This is a simple hello posting on my blog to test the RSS feeds.