I've just been playing around with Jabber some more, and the more I use it the more it rocks.

At work almost a year ago I setup an internal Jabber server and installed Exodus on all the Windows desktops.

We have some perl magic I wrote to generate rosters easily, so now everybody automatically has a bunch of groups for our different offices with all the staff members listed. This is very simple to use and adding a new staff member is only a minutes work.

As I have a Jabber client running from 9-5 every working day I've been looking at using it for giving me status reports and other information, rather than using email.

Writing a command line client to deliver a message to a specific user was easy with the Net::Jabber perl modules.

A quick hack later and rss2email is now sending me RSS feed notices to my jabber server.

This is a lot more convienent than having them go to email for me, and makes me wonder if I could update my server monitoring code to send out Jabber alerts to a bunch of people instead of sending off an email.

Something to play with for the week.

I should write a piece about setting up jabber on the Debian admin site. Work on that slowed for a few days whilst I try to get rid of the table design.

Still I've been told that my proposed design looks too washed out and amateurish. I guess there's a reason that my sites are all very simple looking - I just can't design stuff well.

Maybe I should look around at the Open Source Web Design galleries some more - they have some great stuff there, although it's hard to find the gems.