Conky: Display Last Pidgin Message

Recently, I removed the gnome-panels, added awn, and had a conky bar at the top. However, I missed having a system notification of when I would receive a message via Pidgin. So I browsed the pidgin wiki and create somewhat of a hack to display the last IM that received from Pidgin. This method is probably not the best way however I had some diffuculty.

The DBus method that listens for the received messages was chocking conky and not allowing the conky script to load correctly. So I had to create two files. getim.py would run at startup, listen for a new message and then write that message to a data file. lastim.py would be executed within conky and check the data file for the new message. I know its not real efficient and redundant but it just works. If you have any brilliant ideas please let me know.

Here is the getim.py file:

#!/usr/bin/python

# ----- GETIM.PY // LISTEN FOR AN RECEIVED MESSAGE ------------#
################################################################
# MOST OF THIS SCRIPT  WAS TAKEN FROM THE PIDGIN DEVELOPER WIKI#
# PLEASE VISIT http://developer.pidgin.im/ FOR MORE INFORMATION#
################################################################

def conky_im(account, sender, message, conversation, flags):
reg = '<(.|\n)+?>'                  # REGEX FOR HTML TAGS
message = re.sub(reg,'',message)    # REMOVE HTML TAGS
sender = sender.split("@")[0]       # GET GCHAT NAME
message = message[0:24]             # LIMIT TO 25 CHARS
file = ' '                          # LOCATION OF DATA FILE
fim = open(file,"w")
IM = sender + " said: " + message
fim.write(IM)
fim.close()

import dbus, gobject, re
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop
dbus.mainloop.glib.DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
bus = dbus.SessionBus()

bus.add_signal_receiver(conky_im,
                dbus_interface="im.pidgin.purple.PurpleInterface",
                signal_name="ReceivedImMsg")

loop = gobject.MainLoop()
loop.run()

Copy and paste the following and save as lastim.py:

#!/usr/bin/python

# SHOW LAST IM
f=" "                  # REPLACE WITH YOUR DATA FILE. ie.CONKYIM.DAT
fim = open(f,'r')
im = fim.read()
print im
fim.close

Finally, add this to your .conkyrc script

${execi 1 python ~/scripts/lastim.py}

Any questions/comments let me know. Here is a screen shot of what my conky looks like: