The DF Lab

At the end of 2007, Google did a wonderful thing and added AIM to their built-in chat in Gmail. This was an awesome convenience, since I could now chat with both my used protocols right from my email window. Not to mention I got a nice consolidation of my chat logs accessible from anywhere to boot. Of course, I was leaving all the conveniences of my desktop client behind, such as not being dependent on my browser window to chat. But it seemed all worthwhile, since I usually had a browser window open anyway, and I didn’t have a ton of spare resources (RAM, screen real estate) on my laptop, my sole machine.

Now I’m in the situation where I want to go back to the desktop client. I’ve got a nice new computer with lots of RAM and lots of screen real estate. But I’m now slightly dismayed, because my wonderfully accessible chat logs are now no longer going to be “all” with my mail. I say “all” because before a certain point they weren’t, but from that point on, I was golden. Now, if I switch back, I’ll have all my logs to a certain point on my computer, then a bunch in “the cloud,” and then most of them on my desktop, and some in my browser, for when I’m away from my computer. Not ideal.

What I really want it some “neutral” location for my logs that both the Gmail client and my desktop application (currently Pidgin) will respect and send their logs to. I’ve got web space out there, so I’ve got a location, but how to make it work? One way I could think of is to run something like a Greasemonkey script which keeps track of what it’s sent over time (so when I come back to the computer it’s installed on, it sends the new conversations) and sends new conversations off periodically. So that could be done with Greasemonkey, or with a Firefox Plugin. A modification to Pidgin sounds relatively trivial to me at this point, at least compared to writing a Firefox plugin. In any case, I’m going to ponder this… Any thoughts on the matter, technical or otherwise, are welcome.

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