March 7, 2008 · This post currently has 16 comments
I am trying to redesign my homepage at the moment and in the process applying my new found skills with PHP. 
One thing I put in on all the versions of my homepage is a online status indicator with Yahoo! so that people can contact me directly and have their bricks on my face. Usually I go with the normal script code Yahoo! with their default images for online and offline statuses. But this time, I wanted to display custom images for my online and offline status indicators.
A quick search led me to a where online status is checked using various links from yahoo themselves. It was a good source of inspiration. I used this piece of code:
http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=[username]&m=a&t=1
Which showed a 00 for offline and 01 for online. After a million errors, my newbie skills finally graduated and I created this script which checks for online and offline status of a username and displays custom images depicting the same.
<?
//Insert yahoo messenger status
$check_it = “http://mail.opi.yahoo.com/online?u=getanand321&m=a&t=1″;
$id =”getanand321″;
$online=”<a href=’ymsgr:sendIM?getanand321′><img src=’http://www.theanand.com/images/online-smile.png’ border=’0′></a><br>”;
$offline=”<img src=’http://www.theanand.com/images/offline-smile.png’><br>”;
$file = fopen(“$check_it”.”$id”, “r”);$read = fread($file, 200);
$read = ereg_replace($id, “”, $read);
if ($y = strstr ($read, “00″)) {
$x = “$offline”;
}elseif ($y = strstr ($read, “01″)) {
$x = “$online”;
}
echo (“$x”);
fclose($file);
?>
Put this into a html page and save it as a .php file and upload. Done! I was surprised that I could do this in just 10-15 lines of code than be using any third party script! Hope this helps those who are looking for a solution to display their yahoo messenger status on their websites and homepages. I will soon share a script where you can display your blogs latest posts on a static homepage, in this case, my homepage which is in html at the moment.
Update: I just noted that this same procedure can be used to find if an user is invisible in yahoo or not! This is another accidental yahoo messenger invisible hack!!!
I love Yahoo! they rock . . .
