I seem to be getting a lot of visitors to my post presenting a
script for grabbing an MSN messenger contact list. There have also been plenty of comments which is again good news. They have however brought up a few issues.
This entry is one of a series looking at fetching contacts. For a summary of all the important facts, a demo and the download link please view the MSN contact grab page in the scripts section.
Because different servers are set up differently what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone else. This is definitely the case for my msn messenger contact grabbing script. Some of those problems are mysteries and I haven't been able to pin them down yet. Some have been easily identified and solved. Others, the topic of this post, have been identified but haven't yet been solved.
The main issue which fits into this category is running this script on servers that don't allow the use of sockets. This problem cropped up on a godaddy hosted website but it would seem likely that other providers will also block the use of sockets.
Raúl, whose website this problem first appeared with, and I independently came up with perhaps the only practical solution to this. Running the script on my servers and allowing other people to access the script as a web service will enable anybody, even those who can't use sockets, to fetch a msn contact list.
There are some issues around this, particularly security, that need to be resolved but I'm hoping to have a working solution soon.
Well it has been quite a while since I posted about my intention to create a web service for my MSN contact grabbing script. Unfortunately other commitments have meant I haven't been able to spend any time on this project until today. I've quickly throw
Tracked: Oct 20, 23:30