I recently had a request from one of the librarian's at work to come up with a way to display a librarian's current AOL status (online, offline, away) via a Web page. I spent some time digging around online, but didn't find anything particularly useful. Then I mentioned it to a co-worker, who said he had a snippet of code on his site that did exactly that.

A little digging turned up AOL's AIM Presence, a quick-and-easy utility that allows you to display an icon on your web site indicating your current status. This did the trick nicely, and worked even when logged in via iChat or Trillian (though in both cases, we were using AOL available accounts).

Unfortunately, we're seeing some lag issues between when someone disconnects from the AIM service. In my test case, the user was signed on via Trillian, and it took an hour or two for the change in status to appear on her web page. The same page located on a browser in my machine took about a minute (still too long, but at least it changed). I need to see if using AIM instead of Trillian has an effect; when I tested it on my Mac, the status change on the Web page happened almost instantly.