In a recent post Angus Logan talks about adding someone else’s online presence as a link in a blog entry when you’re referring to them (it’s worth making a note how he gets the CID, as his example uses LiveSide and our IM Presence integration). He spoke to me about this and asked about a plugin for it. At the time, I gave him an alternative using Joe Cheng’s Dynamic Template plugin, but then thought about how to make a plugin for doing this. So I sat down and made the Insert IMMe Link Plugin:

Now, the real pain about adding in someone’s online presence is you need to get their CID code so you can get the presence link working. In Angus’ post, he shows about getting the CID from the link, but I figured this was just a pain, and wanted my plugin to be smarter than that. If you go to someone’s blog (like Angus’ blog) and they have the IM Control embedded in their blog/site (the thing that looks like a Messenger chat window), then you can simply put that link in, select that this site has the user’s IM control on it, then hit the Get CID button and the plugin will attempt to get the CID itself:

How much easier is that! I should point out though, that this will pick up the first CID it finds.

The other thing I thought was needed was a way of storing these links and CIDs, cos you really don’t want to have to get the CID every time, so the plugin also allows you to store (and delete) the people who you link to. Just select Remember this person:

If you select a remembered person from the drop down list, all their details get filled in for you, and you do not need to check the Remember this person again as they will be remembered.

Download: http://gallery.live.com/LiveItemDetail.aspx?li=ab38b04e-7906-4feb-8105-b07018ded8cb
Source code: http://www.codeplex.com/IMMePlugin

SL

Via InsertableContentSource (Me)