There's a pretty popular blog with extremely active comment threads that I like to participate in. The threads are so active that they're pretty much the blog's entire raison d'etre — posts are conversation-starters more than anything else. An average thread runs for at least a hundred comments, and there are several of them a day.

The conversation is fun, but it can be a real pain to keep up with it. Participants are mostly reduced to constantly-refreshing their tiny comment pop-up windows. If you've got a real job to do, it becomes nearly impossible to be a part of the thread.

I wasn't too happy about that, so I cooked up a bot to solve the problem. Instead of constantly-querying threads I can simply tell the bot to pay attention to a particular discussion and IM me when new comments in it show up in the comment RSS feed. I was pleasantly surprised by how well this ended up working, so I've generalized the code a (very) little and thought I'd post it here.

A few things, though. First, the bot uses the AIM network. I realize that the cool kids are all playing with Jabber. But I only use GTalk and AIM, and my mostly-uninformed impression is that Google's implementation of Jabber may not be as open as the protocol's designers intended. Besides, AIM bots are a pretty well-developed technology.

Second, the bot was designed with a very specific purpose and platform in mind. It's likely that you'll have to mess with some Perl to adapt it to whatever RSS-and-IM-involving application you have in mind. But it should at least serve as a good starting point.

With that said, let me know if you have a use for it or need some help bending it to your will.

• echoditto-rssbot.tar.gz