I figured I would throw up a quick post about what I'm doing with my IRC client, and how it's turned into the de-facto messaging hub for just about everything in my online life. If it could handle SMTP/IMAP and RSS, it would be a done deal.
My main client is WeeChat. It connects to my ZNC bouncer. I run it both locally and remotely behind Tmux (the remote client is useful for things like Windows and Mac OS X). In turn, ZNC connects to "standard" IRC servers such as Freenode, OFTC and XMission, as well as Bitlbee. Bitlbee in turn connects to my Google Talk account via XMPP and my Identica and TWitter accounts. Lastly, thanks to Google Voice, I can write an IRC bot that can both send and receive SMS notifications (code still in progress). This means I can interact with mobile phones through my IRC client.
So, in a nutshell, here are all the pieces put together:
- WeeChat - Main IRC client which connects to my bouncer.
- ZNC - IRC bouncer responsible for connecting to all the IRC servers.
- Bitlbee - IRC to IM gateway responsible for XMPP, Twitter and Identica (also supports other chat protocols).
- zmq_notify.rb - WeeChat Ruby script sending away highlights to a ZMQ socket.
- ircsms - Python script that subscribes to the zmq_notify.rb ZMQ socket, and sends an email to mobile provider email-to-sms gateway.
- gvbot - Google Voice IRC bot allowing direct SMS & voicemail interaction through Google Voice (code still in progress).
If you think about it, this means that I can interact with others using the following protocols:
- IRC
- XMPP (and everything else Bitlbee supports)
- HTTP (Twitter/Identica)
- SMS
Of course, a screenshot would be nice, but there are plenty of those online. Instead, why not just put it together? 🙂
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