I briefly mentioned Ping.fm in my previous blog entry, but this site caught my interest, and I've been spending some time working on a Joomla 1.5 package that integrates Ping.fm updates with a joomla site.

Basically, Ping.fm can send your message to a whole stack of social networking sites such as Twitter, Plurk (my personal fave), Tumble, Pownce, Facebook etc.  They also have the ability to send the message to a Custom URL. It's utilising this CustomURL that gave me the idea of writing a component that will receive your status messages from Ping.fm, so that even those who don't subscribe to any social networking sites can see what you've been up to.

(Image grabbed from the Ping.fm blog, hope you don't mind guys!)

By installing the component and setting up the relevant Custom URL in your Ping.fm dashboard, your site will be able to receive status messages.   Have a look at the "What Am I Doing?" page.  This is the page that displays all the status messages.  The component stores received messages into the database, and can be deleted, published or unpublished via the administrator.

Currently, the only options are Date/Time format and the number of Pings (messages) to show.

I also have a module that's almost finished that can display the last x number of messages.  I've set the one up on my homepage to just show the last message, but you can tell it to show however many you want.  The module & component will be available as a single package, and should be ready to download very soon.

If you want to give it a try, head on over to the JoomPing page