Xanga AIM Profile
Date: 04/17/2004
Author: Wayne Eggert
Introduction
So I was sitting around one day and
trying to think of something cool to do with AOL Instant Messenger.
Almost everyone uses it, and in the last couple of years the "Extended
Profiles" and "Think you know me? Take the test!" types of novelties
have been growing quite popular. I wanted to know how they were done
and whether I could put some useful, dynamic information in my AIM
Profile. Turns out it's really not that hard to make a web page display
in your AIM profile.. it just requires you to manually edit the
"info.htm" page, generally found in "C:\Documents and Settings\(Windows User Name)\Application Data\Aim\(AIM User Name)". All I needed to do was to find something useful to display on the web page -- instantly I thought of Xanga because I thought it would be cool to have my latest Xanga post available via a link in my profile.
Getting A Web Page In Your AIM
Starting off simple I decided to figure out how to display any old
website in my AIM profile. So I opened up "info.html", again located in
C:\Documents and Settings\(Windows User Name)\Application Data\Aim\(AIM
User Name) and wrote out some quick HTML for my profile.
I edited "info.html" with the following:
<HTML><BODY BGCOLOR="#CCFF99"><FONT FACE="Arial" LANG="0" SIZE=2>
<A HREF="http://www.google.com" target="_SELF">Google in your profile!</A></FONT></BODY></HTML>
When you save the file and restart instant messenger, you should now have a link to click on in your AIM profile that will load Google.com inside of your profile window. Simple enough, right?
Scraping Xanga Onto A Web Page
Now that we know
how to get a web page to load in the AIM profile, it's time to make the
page that scrapes the Xanga site for the latest post. You'll have to
create this on your own web server. I won't go into details about the
parsing, it's basically just exploding/seperating information on DIV
tags first, then TABLE tags, then TD tags and finally replacing any
unneeded text like the "Currently listening to:".
Here's the code:
<?
echo "<HTML>";
echo "<BODY BGCOLOR=\"#CCFF99\">";
// URL to your Xanga website
$URL = "http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=yourxangausername";
// Download the entire web page into variable $r
$file = fopen("$URL", "r");
$r = "";
do {
$data = fread($file, 8192);
if (strlen($data) == 0) {
break;
}
$r .= $data;
} while (true);
// Begin parsing to find the content of the latest post
// Seperates on "div" tags first, then "tables", then "td" tags.
$xangaPosts = explode('<div class="blogheader">',$r);
$xangaTABLE = preg_split ("/<table.*?>/", $xangaPosts[1]);
$xangaTD = preg_split ("/<td.*?>/", $xangaTABLE[1]);
$postDate = eregi_replace("</div>","",$xangaTABLE[0]);
$post = eregi_replace("Currently Listening to:.*","",$xangaTD[2]);
$post = substr_replace($post,'',0,3);
$post = eregi_replace("<P>","<BR><BR>",$post);
$post = eregi_replace("</P>","",$post);
// Print out the date of the Xanga post & the contents of the post.
echo "<B>".$postDate."</B><BR>";
echo $post;
// Provide a link to read more posts
echo "<BR><A HREF=\"http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=yourxangausername\" TARGET=\"_blank\">[read more]</a>";
echo "</BODY>";
echo "</HTML>";
?>
That's A Wrap
Now all there is to do is to
change that link to Google.com in your "info.htm" file to reference the
Xanga scraping page on your web server. Now you too can have your
latest Xanga posts directly inside your AIM profile! You could also use
this technique to load any other dynamic information into your
profile.. so have at it!
Comments:
| ehhh |
| Posted 02/22/06 3:13PM by noobie |
| how do i find "info.htm" i cant find it in my documents and settings.HELP!!!!! ASAPPAASPAA |
| hmm? |
| Posted 01/20/06 4:14PM by Anonymous Techdoser |
| when i edit the info what program do i use? |
| adding an image |
| Posted 11/17/05 4:40PM by sue |
|
hi does anyone know how to add an image to their aim profile/info?? |
| okay i'll just put it like this |
| Posted 05/09/05 3:08PM by Anonymous Techdoser |
| the URL is http://aimtoday.aol.com/redir.adp?at_spot=at_nw1.home.main.mid&url=http://www.YOURPAGE.com and put the target as target="_aim_today" |
| re:movie clip in profiles |
| Posted 05/08/05 11:36PM by Anonymous Techdoser |
|
it won't work in the profile images, but you can put flash, movies, images, and everything in the aimtoday link. instead of the link given currently to put in info.htm Click Here also, it isa .php file |
| file name |
| Posted 04/11/05 8:06PM by Anonymous Techdoser |
| What do you save the scraping file as? PHP? |
| re: movie clips in profiles |
| Posted 03/26/05 2:36AM by AceBHound |
| I don't think it's possible to have the movie appear directly within the AIM profile. You would probably have to link to it. I know loading images is out of the question because of security risks, so I would assume the same goes for movies. |
| movies clips in profiles |
| Posted 03/23/05 12:09AM by Anonymous Techdoser |
| is it possible to edit the file and add the html for a clip. if so how. i'm hvaing some problems with thing. my sn is eug1080 if anyone has any ideas. |