Getting Microblog-Purple to Work

Microblog-purple is an open source plug-in for Pidgin and other Libpurple-based IM clients. It enables accessing Twitter feeds through an IM client. If you're trying to compile and install microblog-purple from source and are having trouble getting it to work, you may need to change the permissions of a few of the installed files.

In my case, I had troubles getting microblog-purple working from source in Pidgin on Fedora Linux.It was necessary to change the permissions of the following files from 750 to 755, giving read and execute permission to other users:

• /usr/lib/purple-2/libidentica.so
• /usr/lib/purple-2/libtwitter.so
• /usr/lib/purple-2/twitgin.so

This I figured out by reading the screen output from running make install, locating the files, and comparing the files’ permissions to those of a file corresponding to a known working Pidgin plug-in.

The microblog-purple plug-in, listed as Twitgin, showed up in Pidgin’s plug-in list once the aforementioned permissions were changed. Making sure it was checked in the list, I then set up access to my Twitter account by adding it through the Manage Accounts dialog as if it were an IM account. After that, it was up and running.