Set status by time of day

[Mark Meijer]

Is there a plugin to do this?

I'd like to have my status appear 'Busy' or 'Appear Offline' for certain times of the day / week.

I was on a one-day Time Management course yesterday, one of their suggestions to avoid distractions was to use Time Blocking and try to make specific times available for people rather than any time of the day taking interruptions.

[Lihy Cohen]

You can do this using cron. You'll need to install a command-line program called purple-remote that will allow you to automatically update the Pidgin status and message lines. The purple-remote program is included in the libpurple-bin package, which can be installed through System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. After you have installed purple-remote, you can set your away status like this:

/usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=On vacation"

or switch back to available like this:

/usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="

To start Pidgin, you can use

usr/bin/pidgin or to exit: /usr/bin/purple-remote "quit"

Next, fire up crontab -e and set up your cron jobs as you wish, to look somewhat like this:

# IM Status
SHELL=/bin/bash
00 08 * * Mon,Fri /usr/bin/pidgin &
51 08 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message="
00 09 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="
00 13 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=Having lunch"
30 13 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="
30 17 * * Mon,Tue,Wed,Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=At home"
00 19 * * Fri /usr/bin/purple-remote "quit"

Hope this helps! Cheers!