Pidgin Twitter Plugin

This is a part of the microblog-purple project which aims to add microblog support to libpurple based clients. It allows you to quickly receive and update your Twitter messages from a Pidgin conversation window. It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. The project home page only links to the installation instructions for Ubuntu, so here’s how you install it on Fedora 11.

Install the plugin using YUM

• luckily, the package is in the official fedora repository which makes it really easy to install/update

• yum install purple-microblog (that’s all you need to do assuming you already have Pidgin installed)

Enable the plugin

• open Pidgin, go to Tools –> Plugins and enable the Twitgin plugin

Configure your Twitter account

• add a new account in Pidgin (choose TwitterIM protocol). Everything else in the Advanced Tab is already configured, but you can modify it if you wish and you know what you’re doing. Specify a proxy server if you use one.

Enable the account and connect

Verify the SSL certificate

Done, you’re now logged in and you can start tweeting!

Important notes

• version 2.1 which is current in Fedora 11 has a know bug (fix id overflow) which has been corrected in 2.2. Hopefully the new version will be available soon as an update for Fedora users

• other microblog services will be supported in the future (the plugin currently supports Twitter and Identica)

Happy twitting!