I’ve been playing with this idea for a while. Basically I’ve been looking for a nice simple way to add an IM status indicator to this web page. That way, visitors would be able to see if I’m actually around to chat.

But I had a couple caveats.

1. I didn’t want to make my ICQ number publicly available on my site (IM spam is just too god-awful to think about)
2. It had to work with ASP.NET 2.0 and dasBlog.

I’m happy to say I think I came up with something that might actually work, though I’m still testing it.

I’d love to show status for all the major IM systems (I’m on Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and AIM), but ICQ seems to be the easiest to get up and running, so I’ll stick it with for the time being.

If you’d like to get my ICQ number, just email me. There’s a little email button right above the ICQ status indicator (it’s the envelope icon in the upper right). That button now actually works, too, which is new. It’ll display a form for sending me an email (that way, my email address isn’t exposed on the page, either).

And, once I clean it up a bit, I’ll blog the actual ASP code that makes the ICQ status indicator possible.