In the comment section, Ton writes:

Hi TDavid, Stuart Henshall pointed me to your blog, with your Skype-roll. I was wondering if you could give us all a clue on how you incorporated the status image from Skype in your blog. I am also wondering if you can do the same for the people that are in the blogroll, adding their Skype status. Cheers, Ton

Hi Ton, thanks for stopping by and commenting. To create the indicators I modified an existing commercial program of mine called Online Offline Manager which allows webmasters to customize images to display for any purpose and display their status on one or more webpage. For the second part of your question, I am considering making a hosted version of this possibly for a small fee (to cover bandwith) and make it available to anybody who would like a simple, customizable hosted online/offline/busy indicator online to put on their websites and/or blogs. I might also make the program free for use for a limited number of users, but honestly I’d have to see how much interest was there. 

There is also another small program I wrote (Windows app) which sits in the system tray and updates the online indicator based upon my keyboard activity. I believe that it is 20 minutes of inactivity that Skype changes from “online” to “away” which is what my app does. So the indicator isn’t really connected to Skype in any way, though it is accurate within seconds of my actual Skype status, and it is an indicator that runs independent and can indicate the user’s overall online / offline / busy status.

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