Library Web Chic

I got asked about the code we use at SUNY Cortland to show whether or not a chat reference assistance is available (ie. someone is logged in to AIM). So I am posting the relevant code below:

<img border="0" src="http://big.oscar.aol.com/yourAIMusername?
on_url=http://library.cortland.edu/images/im_online.gif
&off_url=http://library.cortland.edu/images/im_offline.gif"/>


Your AIM username goes in the spot that says “yourAIMusername”. Additionally, you can use whatever graphics you want to represent the fact that you are offline or online.

Update

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this code and wanted to try to respond to some of them here. First, I don’t know alot about the code, other than it works, sporadically, and seems to like IE best. (I can’t seem to make it work on my site even though it works just fine on the library’s site.) Second, I’m not sure if there is something similar out there for Yahoo Messenger but I bet if I did a web search I might find something. I posted it because it is in my opinion a good way to try to let people know you are online. It isn’t perfect. I’m hoping maybe that there will be better tools for this down the line. For now its the only relatively workable option I know of.