So it’s no secret that you can use GTalk to update your Twitter status, but I got really tired of having both an IM status message via pidgin, as well as a Twitter status message that propagated to– well, everything else really.

Then I happened across this little guide: http://www.dailygyan.com/2008/04/set-your-latest-twitter-tweet-as-pidgin.html

It takes some set-up if you don’t have perl on your system (and then even if you do, you have to tell it to install some new stuff, although it does all the work for you). After you’ve got step 3 enabled, it’s pretty much just a matter of downloading the plugin and turning it on.

However, I definitely decided that this wasn’t enough, because it doesn’t weed out messages beginning with “@” the way the Facebook app does. Thus it was time to dig into the code:

if(Purple::SavedStatus::is_idleaway() || !$updateonidleonly)

(Line 44) becomes

if(Purple::SavedStatus::is_idleaway() || !$updateonidleonly && $status_message !~ /\@.+/)

and BAM! It does what it needs to do.

Enjoy, anybody ridiculous enough to care about this.