Last month I wrote a Irssi plugin that pushed messages from Irssi to Beanstalkd. I was pretty happy with it, but I wanted more. So, I’ve improved it. The new version pushes in a slightly more normalized json payload to one of two beanstalk tubes. The tubes are configured for here and away. Then the python script that consumes them either displays it via a notification pop up, if sent to the here tube, or to pushover if sent to the away tube.

History

As I wrote about a long time ago I use to use a custom script with irssi to push to mumbles. Well, mumbles has gone defunct and I couldn’t really find a good growl client for linux. Plus with me traveling into the office weekly, it’s just not going to work well since growl is more push notification. So this lead me to research a true messaging system to try it.

One of the biggest problems with irssi is that if you run it on remote machine, it can be quite hard to get notifications. For the past couple of years, I’ve been running a plugin called fnotify that writes notifications to a file, then using another script I read that file and print it out with libnotify. There are a couple of problems with this:

1. libnotify is ugly
2. takes up diskspace if you don’t clear the queue
3. requires you to either have the script, or remember the ridiculously long command