skypebutton

Amoung the many improvements I have been making to my this last week I decided I would add a Skype "Call Me" style button to the side bar. The complicated part of this arose when I found I did not really care for any of the available buttons offered by Skype, so I set about coding my own custom buttons in PHP.

You see Skype provides a bunch of free custom buttons but did not want to be tied into the default Skype buttons images. For more Skype users I imagine that would be fine, and if you are looking for is a quick and dirty method of displaying your Skype online presence the visitors of your website then I would recommend looking at the Skype free custom buttons wizard. However if you're looking for more control over what you presence icons will look like then continue reading I will explain how I produced mine.

The solution I found was this great script which I then a heavily modified. Basically it is a PHP application that ties into the status codes of Skype and returns a PNG image associated with the current online status of the requested user. Because the return value is the correct PNG image is possible to incorporate the script into any HTML website be it one hosted on your own server or our external for example forums.

Like all my freeware applications and scripts you can download from here. Basically download that zip file can place a folder on your web server then just open skype.php and enter your Skype username on line 50. if you would like to change your icons all you must do is change each of the images included in the image folder maintaining the file names.

Now all you have to do is enter the URL of skype.php into any HTML image tag for e.g.

<img src="/myapps/customskypebutton/skype.php" alt="Current Skype Status" />
becomes