Ever since the developers added the Attention button to Pidgin, one of the most common questions asked is how to remove it. I finally set some time aside to answer this question.

• Download the plugin that does exactly this from the Pidgin developer page.
• Install the Pidgin developer dependencies if you haven’t already:

  sudo apt-get install ubuntu-dev-tools subversion g++ pidgin-data libpurple0 libpurple-dev pidgin-dev libgtk2.0-dev

  This step is important or you’ll receive errors like the following:

  $ make
  [CC] hide_attention_button.o
  Package pidgin was not found in the pkg-config search path.
  Perhaps you should add the directory containing `pidgin.pc'
  to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
  No package 'pidgin' found
  Package purple was not found in the pkg-config search path.
  Perhaps you should add the directory containing `purple.pc'
  to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
  No package 'purple' found
  Package gobject-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
  Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gobject-2.0.pc'
  to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
  No package 'gobject-2.0' found
  Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
  Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc'
  to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
  No package 'gtk+-2.0' found
  hide_attention_button.c:24:20: fatal error: plugin.h: No such file or directory
  compilation terminated.
  make: *** [hide_attention_button.o] Error 1

• Drop the .c and Makefile into a folder and in a terminal run the following commands:

  make
  sudo make install

  If all went well you’ll see:

  $ make
  [CC] hide_attention_button.o
  [SHLIB] hide_attention_button.so
  $ sudo make install
  mkdir -p /`pkg-config --variable=prefix purple`/lib/purple-2
  install hide_attention_button.so /`pkg-config --variable=prefix purple`/lib/purple-2

Restart pidgin and enable the plugin under Tools – Plugins – Hide Pidgin Attention Button.

Close but not Perfect

Although this plugin really does hide your Attention button, it still exists if you hover over where it used to be:

At least it’s much smaller now and less likely to be accidentally clicked!

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Even though it hasn’t worked for quite some time now, my previous PHP WebSocket chat application has garnered quite a bit of attention and is still one of my most heavily trafficked posts. As a result I thought I’d provide you all with a working script as of Feb 15, 2012. Also, because I’m your typical lazy developer, I’ll be building on top of other peoples’ work – most notably PHPWebSocket.

You can download the final script here. According to the Wikipedia article on WebSockets, it should work in IE10+, Firefox 7+ and Chrome 14+. Personally I tested with Chrome 17.0.963.46 and Firefox 10.0.1.

I want to stress that this tutorial is designed to be extremely basic and as such does not give alot of functionality out of the box (but provides all the tools required to add more). It’s simply a working example of a PHP-based WebSocket server.

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