Robert Basic has continued his series looking at using Dbus in PHP with this latest post to his blog - using the foundation he's created before to make a chat bot that will listen and respond to commands on a Jabber network.

Now that we know how to use DBus to communicate with Pidgin from PHP and how to listen to DBus signals, it’s time to put it all together by creating a simple chat bot! Nothing fancy, just a simple script that runs somewhere on some server and, by using a Pidgin account, can respond to some basic queries we send it.

His new code listens for an incoming message on the "PurpleInterface", grabs the name of the sender and calls a "PurpleConvImSend" method with the conversation object and the message to send. You can find the complete source for the project on his github account.

Along with the popularity of Twitter has come one of it biggest problems - its instability. More and more people are using the service every day and some are leaving when they encounter the frustration of too much downtime. Enter a project that Graham Christensen is getting started - Stablr, a PHP-based version of the popular web service.

Stablr, the proposed name, will be the main gateway for it's users. People will post to Stablr, which will then (when it can) forward it to Twitter. If a Stablr users posts to Twitter directly, the message will be retrieved and replicated on Stablr. Responses to posts, direct messages, and tweets from friends of Stablr users would also be replicated.

He's already seen some great response from the community with offers to help and has taken it to the next level by coming up with a five-page document detailing the plans behind the project (using things like caching, an Access database and Jabber integration).

The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.

Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.

You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.