Gus What?!

I know, I know I just about dropped off the face of the blogosphere as far as content goes these days. So, I’m back and…I have been quite busy as you are about to read.

I am proud to announce the start of beta testing for “Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin”. Anyone can participate in this test. The basic information, registration and download page can be found at Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin (BETA). Yes, you have to agree to a EULA and this plugin only works with AIM® Triton or any other AIM® enabled IM client. You will find more details in the plugin’s home-page.

So, “What does this plugin do?”, you might ask. It basically adds the power of regular expressions to help you transform your incoming and outgoing instant messages. Checkout, regular-expressions.info, for an excellent reference on this topic.

After registering with this site, you should begin by downloading the installer. A link to this will be provided after you register. You will receive your beta activation key via e-mail. Once you have the key, you can install the plugin by running the installer and activate it when you first sign on to AIM®. You will not be able to use the plugin until it is successfully activated. Hopefully, this part of the beta test will go as smoothly as possible.

I will begin to describe some of the unique features of this plugin over the next few posts. For now, I will point you to the most basic thing you will want to do: Where to customize the regular expression rules. Click on the blue “Actions” button in the Buddy List® and select the “RX-Plugin Settings…” option. If you don’t see it, then either the plugin is not installed, it is disabled (see below for how to enable it), or there is some other problem–let me know.

The plugin comes with some pre-defined rules to get you started. Try “gusrx”, “yt?”, “addme”, “yes”, “no”, “go”, and “im(gusverdun)”. These rules will send, respectively, an IM with a link to this plugin’s home-page, a red “Are you there?”, a link to make it easy for your buddy to add your name to his/hers user list, a blue “yes”, a red “no”, a green “go”, and a link that your buddy can use to start an IM with the specified buddy in parenthesis. There are a few more rules which I will cover in a future post.

IMPORTANT: There are some rules in the plugin that will interfere with the EZFormat plugin in AIM® Gadgets (formerly known as JAMS). I recommend that you disable either those rules in the RX-Plugin (EZ Bold, EZ Italics, and EZ Underline) or, disable the EZFormat plugin. To disable the EZFormat Plugin you can go to the “Plugins” tab in your AIM Settings (Press F7 from any AIM window and click on the Plugins tab) and un-check the EZFormat Plugin. The RX-Plugin also lets you enable and disable individual rules via a checkbox next to the rule’s name.