Alex Little

Getting on better now! I’ve got the presence icon in the forums displaying as a live feed – and updates dynamically when I change my presence state in the MSG client, all I’ve got to sort out now is ensure that the link is active/inactive when the user switches between online and offline states. One thing I’ve noticed is that although I can get the image to update dynamically, I can read the alt text, but I’m unable to edit it dynamically (in FireFox anyway)  – I need this done for accessibility, if the alt text starts off as ‘free for chat’ (with corresponding image), then the user switches to away, I need the alt text to switch to ‘away’ too. It’d be a shame if the alt text was read only and can’t be altered dynamically, as it may mean I have to replace the whole <img> tag, rather than just the src and alt attributes.

I’ve also got the number of users online display to update dynamically. With both of these dynamic changes I’ve put config option in the block settings so the time between checking for changes can be altered.

Spent the last couple of days at MoodleMoot & Moodle Hackfest, though unfortunately I’ve got to miss the final day (today) of MoodleMoot. Monday (hackfest day) was good, meeting up with the guys from Covcell as they’re doing very similar things with Moodle and instant messaging that I’m working on for the OCI project. Found that they had a lot of similar queries/issues as we’ve been discussing here, for example to do with deciding when someone has logged out (do they stay logged in to the IM client even after they’ve left or logged out of Moodle), and how to display the contacts, when there could potentially be 100′s of them.

All the presentations I attended at MoodleMoot yesterday were really interesting, and shame I’ve got to miss out today – though might get chace to catch some this afternoon.