A while ago I wrote that I wanted someone to come up with an Adium plugin that would serve all open conversations to an iPhone (or any browser) as web pages, and how hard could it be since message views are HTML already?

Well, as far as I know, that plugin doesn’t exist; but it looks like Colloquy’s developers had the same idea I had, and they made a plugin for their IRC client that lets you keep Colloquy open on your computer so you can access to your messages from an iPhone (it’s probably not extraordinarily secure, so just don’t discuss trade secrets on there, okay?).

Here’s a summary of the instructions, for future reference, in case the blog post disappears (since there’s no documentation included with the plugin — which looks very much beta at this point, so I just assume they’ll make it more straightforward in the future, although the article dates back to last July so I’m not sure it’s moving forward very fast):

• install Colloquy and download the plugin

• install the plugin into ~ /Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns

• open Terminal and type:
  defaults write info.colloquy WebInterfacePassword yourpassword

• restart Colloquy

Now your computer is serving all your chats on port 6667; as soon as your router is configured to forward that port, you’re good to go.

As it stands now, the system probably kills your iPhone’s battery (the “loading” spinner never stops spinning), but that’s much, much better than Meebo and any other solution (for non-jailbreaked iPhone, and until the SDK is out). Between that and yesterday’s web-based IRC client that I used on my blog to create a personal chatroom, I’m not sure I’m not going to shut down Adium completely.

P.S. Oh, and the web interface even has an extended mode that gives you more functionality (i.e., a source list just like on the software application) when you access it from a computer rather than an iPhone. Excellent.