Alex Little

I’ve finally finished writing another little widget that I started a while ago, this one allows you to display live presence status embedded on any webpage, without the end user being logged in to MSG (or even needing an MSG account) – you can see it in action at the top of this page. Clicking on the status icon will launch the MSG client.

In order to prevent anyone monitoring (or just displaying) anyone elses presence status, for each username and url (domain and directory) you’d like to display the icon on, we need to assign you a unique ‘key’ – in a similar way to how the Google maps API keys work. At the moment we don’t have an automatic form for generating these keys, so for now you’ll just need to email us with the username, and the url of site you’d like to display the icon on.

Here’s that code that you’ll need to paste onto your page to display the presence icon:

<script src="http://msg.open.ac.uk/msg/widget/msgstatuswidget.jsp
?host=msg.open.ac.uk
&user=a.little%25open.ac.uk
&refresh=10
&showText=true
&key=mykey
&showIcon=true">
</script>


Here’s a brief description of each of the parameters:
host: MSG host server where the user account resides
user: username of the presence icon to display
Refresh: how often (in seconds) the widget should check for presence changes. Minimum is 10 seconds and specifying 0 will mean the presence status is only loaded when the page first loads
showText: true/false of whether to show the textual description of the status (default false)
showIcon: true/flase of whether to show the icon (default true)
key: key for the url and username combination

Any comments/feedback welcome

The MSG Presence Maps have now been launched live on the OpenLearn LearningSpace and LabSpace websites. This adds Google maps integration to the MSG block on both sites, allowing users to see where other users are located geographically. This also means that MSG is now available in LearningSpace – not just LabSpace, giving a much larger potential user base as the LearningSpace has approximately 10 times the hit rate of LabSpace!

Feedback is always welcome, especially on the new presence maps, so feel free to leave a comment here on my blog, or alternatively on the MSG Forum.