Warning: Geekiness alert
Ok, as people may remember, I’m semi in love with 30Boxes at the moment. So, as an ode to my dedication (and for a bit of a challenge), I’ve decided to try and write an MSN bot that can hook up to your 30 boxes calendar and you can simply ask the bot on MSN, “today” and it will list your events for today. Similarly, you’ll be able to say “tomorrow”, or any date and should tell you all the events you have on it. At the moment, I’ve managed to get my code to hook up to the MSN Messenger network. I’m kinda making a Java rehash of Blobsy, a PHP based MSN Messenger Bot. The reason I’m rewriting it is cos I have a random urge to try and understand how MSN works and to be honest it’s all pretty straight forward! Plus I’m also much more confident with Java than PHP. I shall give the people the email address for the bot when it’s in a reasonable state, ie. you can actually ask it something.
sweet. let us know when you get it working! eventually, maybe we can add reminders via your msn messenger
Wow! Cheers for the comment Narenda! I really didn’t expect a comment from you guys on it this quick! I’d been thinking about the reminders too since you added it to 30Boxes. My rough roadmap (as stored in my head at the moment) is to:
a) create an empty MSN bot which allows for separate modules to be added
b) create a 30 boxes parsing class that can then be used in other bots for other networks, AIM, Yahoo, etc
i) perform the obvious API queries first, ie. get by tag, get by date
ii) add the ability to add new users when they add the bot to their contact list
iii) reminders, I’m still wondering about how they would be cached in the bot and checking for modifications, etc…
iv) then (depending on whether the API is finished) adding events through the bot, though having just thought about it, it maybe be possible using just the URL, and I could probably return the newly added event to the user to show them how it was added.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people will find the bot useful (I know I will, hence why I’m making it) Unfortunately my finals are in a few weeks, so initial progresss maybe a bit slow until after April 7th (last exam! Sweet!)