awaytoweb readme
Adam Mathes
august 2004


Awaytoweb is a simple perl script that monitors AOL Instant Messenger Away 
messages to produce simple web pages and RSS feeds. Please note that 
America Online is in no way involved or responsible for this program.

Please see the included LICENSE file for license information about this 
software.


REQUIREMENTS

Perl 5.
Perl modules:
	Net::OSCAR
	Config::Natural
	HTML::Template
	HTML::Scrubber

INSTALLATION

Untar and gunzip the archive in a directory of your choice. No further 
installation or compliation should be necessary, other than installation 
of the above mentioned perl modules and their dependencies.


CONFIGURATION

Configuration is done by editing the file awaytoweb.conf - most 
configuration options should be self-explanatory.

List the screennames you wish to monitor in buddies.txt, one per line.

You can customize the output of the HTML by editing html.templ.

You can customize the output of the RSS by editing rss.templ.

Support for the Blogger API is still experimental, but can be tried by 
setting the 'doWeblog' configuration variable to 1. Only MovableType 2.6x 
was tested.


USE

Suggested use is to use nohup to keep the program running perpetually.

	nohup ./awaytoweb



KNOWN ISSUES

The script can not handle more than approximately 255 buddies.

HTML is 'scrubbed' by HTML::Scrubber but is probably not entirely safe. 
The truly paranoid may want to consider stripping any HTML from the 
messages to ensure security.

This script entirely depends on Net::OSCAR which is a reverse engineered 
implementation of the OSCAR protocol. America Online may at some point 
change the protocol, or modify their servers to disallow acces from 
scripts such as this.


BUGS

Probably lots.


MORE

More information is available at:

http://www.adammathes.com/projects/awaytoweb/

Contact information is available at: http://www.adammathes.com
