I ran across an interesting utility in a post on kuro5hin.org. It’s called Instant Gratification. What it does is, if you’re running a weblog, and someone visits, you get sent an instant message to your IM client! This gives you the opportunity, if it’s a logged-in user or someone on a related weblog (like LiveJournal, Blogger, and others share user accounts among thousands of blogs — but I run Drupal, so it’s just among a few hundred and whether the user logs in is totally up to the user to decide, rather than involuntary) to actually send IM’s to your visitors to determine whether they liked what they saw, what improvements you could put in, etc.
I dig it, and I think I’m going to use it. Now to hack my HTML code to allow it!
There’s another cool utility on that page called Blog Change Bot What this little bot does is allow people to receive Instant Messenger notifications when a blog entry on your site is updated.
Now, I already track users IM addresses (once again, on a purely voluntary basis if they decide to provide them), so converting this to a Drupal module should not be a big deal. I think the two could provide some really useful little utilities to Jon’s, Paul’s, and my blogs. Those are the three I really check every day 🙂 It would be nice if I could avoid checking them at all, and just get an IM when they are updated so I can check them when that happens. I track them on my site cloud anyway, so I kind of get a delayed-reaction notification when they change. It would rock to be notified within moments if they change — that way I can log on, leave a comment, and even fire them off a Private Message while they are still online! Or do similar things when Justin or Sam leaves an entry up here at barnson.org.