Introduction
A couple of days ago Oliver Kohl mentioned to me about the presence of a site called IMified.com which tends to make things simpler by making them accessible through Instant Messengers. What took my fancy though was the api which would let us create custom Widgets which can be accessed over the messenger.... Read about How to build IMified Widgets here... I created a simple PHP script to find out if it would actually work out and I was surprised at the outcome....Disclaimer
For the lack of a better server I used PHPnet.us' free PHP hosting so extremely sorry for the ad banners. My Knowledge of PHP is extremely rudimentary so the PHP scripts may look very childish... at least they get the job done for me 🙂The Widget
The Widget does an extremely simple thing, it remembers the last time you pinged it... You need to have an IMified account to add the widget to your list.- On the Widgets page in your IMified account click on add by url and fill in a name for the widget and the URL for the Widget which would be http://abesh.phpnet.us/index.php.
- It will redirect to a page on the widget's site which will ask you for your name :
- After you submit your name successfully, it gets added and shows up on your list of widgets :
- On invoking the widget you get the following outcome with the timestamp changing everytime you query it :
The Code
functions.incLast words...
Yeah, I know... Production Order Confirmation is not the scenario that I am showcasing here because my limited knowledge of PHP as well as the limitations of PHPnet.us will not let me allow to create such a scenario. But I am pretty sure that our PHP Magician Blag (Alvaro Tejada) can definitely endorse whether such a scenario is possible... This, as Oliver put it after testing this widget, is only the beginning... I'm sure we will see a Production Order Confirmation scenario in the near future...
8 Comments
