IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol that lets you communicate in text based chat rooms over the internet, and is basically what we all used to use in the 90’s before Twitter or WhatsApp. Think of it like multi-player notepad.
Most folk don’t even know it exists, but many technical people (especially those in the free software community) use IRC to facilitate discussion and development with people around the world.
I quite often use my Known site to share links with people over twitter and facebook, but to do the same with folk in IRC I’d have to paste the link by hand, and, well… I’m lazy. So I wrote a plugin!
One particularly handy thing you can do, combined with my command line API tools, is that you have a quick way to post from system services or internet connected (IoT) devices… but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Known IRC
The Known IRC plugin adds the ability to syndicate short messages and share links to one or more IRC channels.
Once activated and configured, you will be able to syndicate out to IRC straight from your site.
Limitations
There are a couple of limitations of course…
- IRC only lets you have one nickname per network (freenode, efnet etc), so if you sit on IRC as well, use a different nickname. Also consider registering this name with nickserv (the plugin supports nickserv passwords)
- The plugin doesn’t perform a persistent login (for various reasons), therefore it’ll join, post and then leave the channel.