AIM Profile Things

Hire a Profile Consultant. It worked for this guy. Plus there are some extra tips for making your AIM profile cool.

Download the Quicktime video of Instant Messenger Profile Consultant

The math question for leaving a comment on this site is to prevent bots from comment spamming this site. It's like that thing where you have to type in the letters from an image to prove you're a human. Sorry if it's a hassle, but if I turn it off this site will get a bunch of comment spam. You can bypass it by registering for an account here and logging in before commenting.

I'm still working on the random quotes thing, just very slowly. It's mostly done in terms of functionality but I just have to make it make more sense and be easier. Now the add quote form is easier and after you add a quote it gives you some more instructions in case you need them. After a few more minor things I'll try to make this all look better.

I found this IM service, Sabifoo, which lets you send IMs that get posted to a blog and a news feed. It seems pretty cool, and I'm sorta trying to think of some cool things to do with that. Also, now facebook lets you grab your own feed for use in a facebook type blog, which they call "notes." So you could use Sabifoo and then point facebook to the Sabifoo feed. Then you could IM Sabifoo and it would get posted to your facebook profile. Of course that should work anywhere that will accept feeds. When's myspace going to allow feed importing?

I just realized that unlike the proper rendering of HTML, the AIM profile viewer preserves whitespace. In other words, if you put multiple space next to each other, the profile viewer will show them all. In normal web browsers, this would only be rendered as a single space. That's something to keep in mind when you're trying to make a page look the same in AIM and in a web browser.

I added some forums. I'll see how that goes. You have to register in order to post. If they just get filled up with junk I'll get rid of them.

I decided to let you guys test out the random quotes service. What you do is register for an account here, log in, then add quotes. Then go to the random quotes page while logged in and it'll tell you a special URL to paste into your profile and it will just pull random quotes from the ones you have submitted.

I'm not sure how well this is going to work out, and it's still really rough, so use it at your own risk and leave comments if it's working or not.

I'm working on a random quotes service where you would log in to this site and add your own quotes. Then you would insert some HTML into your profile and it would show the random quote. It's pretty much like the random quote feature I have now, except you can use your own quotes, or the quotes of all other site users. I'm making decent progress on this, and I'll probably have something ready for you in about a week. Also, by letting you sign up for this site and log in, I can eventually add more custom features as I think of them.

I guess AIM is now officially allowing plugin and bot creation. Here's the AIM Developers site. I think you have to sign up for something and agree to some legal stuff, but then you can develop plugins for the AIM service, AIM bots, or custom AIM clients. I'm glad they're finally encouraging AIM developers, but I wonder if it's a little too late considering there are already lots of unofficial AIM plugins and third party bots. I was thinking of trying to do an AIM bot, but I want to wait until I get a chance to read and understand all of the legal agreement before starting work on that.

This is the first post for this new site. It's going to have tricks and things to put in your AIM profile. Also there will be some tutorials for how to do different things with your AIM profile. I'll probably work on some profile services too as I think of them. Check out the links above for now, and stay tuned.