Starting with BitlBee
A while ago I was somehow introduced to bitlbee and I loved the concept. Not only for the possibilitie to have IRC, FB, MSN and Google Talk in the same application/window. But also cause it can be extended to be used as a real-time log viewer for your CI Server and website. This is a first of 3 blog posts on the subject with some extra tips & tricks on the side. Setting it all up
It's just a simple aptitude command to install and start it, after it's installed you connect to it with your favorite IRC client. Once you're connected make sure you register with the server and follow the quickstart intro.
sudo aptitude install bitlbee
Configure**** Facebook
Setting up facebook is simple but you need to keep a few things in mind. First off you need a Facebook username. Next run this command and make sure you type your username all lowercase cause it will fail if you don't. (Note that you can use acc instead of account if you don't like typing it over and over again.)
account add jabber USERNAME@chat.facebook.com PASSWORD
Since by default userId's will be shown instead of full names we use the following 2 commands to use the full name and add a [fb] prefix to each facebook user.
account facebook set nick_source full_name
account fb set nick_format [fb]%-@full_name
Configure Google Talk (Jabber/XMPP)
Adding your Google Talk account is as simple as adding a facebook account. Just replace USERNAME with the Google account email address.
account add jabber USERNAME PASSWORD talk.google.com:5223:ssl
Just like the facebook account we also set a prefix here.
account gtalk set nick_format [gtalk]%-@handle
Giving each account it's own channel
The following commands create channels for Facebook and Google Talk and set them to only show Facebook users in the facebook channel and Google Talk users in the gtalk channel.
/join &facebook
channel facebook set fill_by account
channel facebook set account fb
/join >alk
channel gtalk set fill_by account
channel gtalk set account 0
Finishing up
Now that we set everything up we want to connect our accounts simply run the following command and it will connect to the remote servers.
account on
Just hit the save command to save your configuration to disk.
save
Interesting reads/links