Alex Little

I’ve just finished writing my first version of an MSG widget for the Netvibes environment and it’s ready for people to have a play with.

The widget will give you the presence state of your contacts (with “click to chat” option) and notify you when new messages are received.

To add the widget to you’ll need to log into you Netvibes page then select ‘Add Content’, under the ‘External widgets’ section select ‘UWA Module’. Click on the ‘Add to my page’ link, which will then add the generic UWA Module to your page. Then edit the settings for this module so the Widget URL is set to: http://alexlittle.net/blog/download.php?file=msg-uwa-latest.html. You must also ensure the ‘Inline this widget’ box is ticked (else it won’t remember your password).

You can now edit the MSG Widget to set your MSG username and password and then whenever you log into your Netvibes page you’ll automatically be logged into MSG and receive new message notifications and the presence status of your contacts.

OU users: if you normally use your OU network password to access MSG on msg.open.ac.uk, you should create a new password for accessing msg.open.ac.uk (otherwise Netvibes will be storing your OU network password), to do this please follow these instructions.

Please note that currently the MSG Netvibes widget will only connect to the msg.open.ac.uk server, so you must have an account on this server to be able to use the widget. After we’ve done some more testing we’ll extend this so you can use the widget to connect to your MSG-OpenLearn profile.

Feel free to try out the widget and let me have any feedback

Next step (after any bug fixes!) is to see if this widget can be used with iGoogle – in theory it should as they use the same UWA, but I’ve not tested it out yet. And after that, make a Facebook application for MSG…