as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

This week is Ubuntu Developer Week, and I'm giving a talk named Hooking your app into your desktop CouchDB on Wednesday at 1800UTC. Ubuntu Developer Week is sort of a conference, but it's all on IRC. I've never given a talk on IRC before. Anyway, some people just speak off the cuff. (I do this in real life a lot.) Some people have notes and speak from their notes. (I do this a lot too; with slides for talks at in-person conferences.) Since this is IRC, though, I thought I'd write my talk ahead of time. Now, you don't want to just cut-and-paste your whole talk into an IRC channel and then log off. That's not a talk, that's a blog post. The way UDW is set up is that you give a talk in #ubuntu-classroom* and people ask questions on #ubuntu-classroom-chat. So there's some interaction with the audience. So, what I wanted was a way to deliver the talk, line by line, and be able to stop when I wanted. Enter an xchat plugin: xchat-give-talk. To use: enable the XChat Python plugin (Edit > Preferences > Scripts and Plugins > Python in xchat-gnome), and then:

/py load /path/to/xchat-give-talk.py
/talkload /path/to/talk/as/a/text/file.txt

and then /talknext will send the next line of your talk to the channel. (If you lose your place, /talkinfo will tell you how far you are through the talk and what the next line will be.) /talkload loads that talk for the channel you are currently in; you can have more than one talk going at once in different channels. So, just keep doing /talknext in the channel and it'll walk through your talk, line by line.