Shoutbox

Well, after I saw Sprinkles' idea about web services, I started coding.
The idea of this plugin is to easily share information from the net with your contacts. For example, by typing "/xparse quote einstein" some quotes of einstein will be sended automatically.
Inspired by TB's talkers I decided to make it a very flexible plugin. People can make scripts to handle different websites. The plugin creates a Microsoft XML Domdocument object from a given url, and then the script can filter out the necessary information. Instead of talkers, I call these scripts 'parsers'. At the moment I created 4 different parsers:

• News parser, grabs the latest news headers from cnn
  
• Quote parser, grabs the Quotes of the Day from quotationspage.com, or searches for quotes when an argument is supplied
  
• Family guy quote parser, send random quotes from 'The family guy' to your contacts
  
• Msgweb news parser, quite useless maybe, but it gets the latest news from my website
  
• Azlyrics.com parser, search for lyrics
  
• dictionary.com, get the meaning of a word...
  
• Parser for http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to get the current time in all big cities

For now I didn't make a dll yet, so I can't upload a plugin version, but here is a screenshot of the config window. It clearly illustrates the use of the plugin:



I'd like to know

• what you think of this idea.
  
• what features you'd like to see in the final version.
  
• what parsers you think would be useful.
  
• who's interested in developing parsers
  
• what would be a good name for the plugin ;)

For the scripters, here is the source of the quote parser (quote.vbs)

code:

---

sub info() 'purpose: give the config screen all the parser info
    engine.description = "Share more than 20,000 famous quotes with your contacts"
    engine.help = "This parser gets the quotes from http://www.quotationspage.com. When you don't supply a parameter the parser will show you the quotes of the day. Otherwise it'll do a search for the supplied text."
    engine.syntax = "<search (optional)>"
end sub

sub run()
    if trim(engine.argument) <> "" then
        url = "http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=" & trim(engine.argument)
    else
        url = "http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html"
    end if
    engine.getXML cstr(url), "parse", true
end sub

'There is a regularity in the source code of the website:
'all quotes are between <dt> tags
'all authors are between <dd> tags, and are shown bold (with a <b> tag)
'with this information we can make the follow code:
'note that the xml object is data.xml

sub parse(xml) 'purpose: filter the xmlobject
    i = 0
    for each item in xml.getElementsByTagName("dt")
        if str = "" then
            str = item.Text & vbcrlf & "---" & xml.getElementsByTagName("dd").item(i).getElementsByTagName("b").item(0).text
        else
            str = str & vbcrlf & vbcrlf & item.Text & vbcrlf & "---" & xml.getElementsByTagName("dd").item(i).getElementsByTagName("b").item(0).text
        end if
        i = i + 1
    next
    engine.output cstr(str)
end sub

---

As you can see it ain't that much code to handle a single website...

Let me hear what you think

edit: Installer link:
http://shoutbox.menthix.net/attachment.php?pid=379120

API Tutorial link:
http://www.msgweb.nl/en/MEWS/tutorial.php