Making Pidgin "portable" just got easier.

Here I made a nice little series of commands to drop in a batch file. The only thing I didn't do was add in a line for importing your .purple folder into the \programs folder. But you can do that with :: Xcopy "%appdata%\.purple\*.*" "\programs\.purple\"
Just add it @ the end of your batch file.

::First things first. I'm in UR Echo, dumping my excludes.
Echo \perlmod\ >Exclude1
Echo \locale\ >Exclude2
Echo pidgin-uninst.exe >Exclude3
mkdir Programs
::base dirs
MKDIR Programs\Pidgin\
MKDIR Programs\GTK\
::Pidgin Lines
MKDIR Programs\Pidgin\sounds\
MKDIR Programs\Pidgin\pixmaps\
:: Went with XCOPY instead :p
XCOPY "C:\Program Files\Pidgin\*.*" "Programs\Pidgin\" /E /H /G /EXCLUDE:Exclude1+Exclude2+Exclude3
DEL Programs\Pidgin\plugins\perl.dll
DEL Programs\Pidgin\plugins\tcl.dll
REN Programs\Pidgin\Pidgin.exe Pidgin-portable.exe
:: /Pidgin lines

:: GTK lines "C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0"
MKDIR Programs\GTK\
MKDIR Programs\GTK\bin\
MKDIR Programs\GTK\etc\
MKDIR Programs\GTK\lib\
MKDIR Programs\GTK\share\
XCOPY "C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\bin\*.*" "Programs\GTK\bin\" /E /H /G
XCOPY "C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\etc\*.*" "Programs\GTK\etc\" /E /H /G
XCOPY "C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\lib\*.*" "Programs\GTK\lib\" /E /H /G /EXCLUDE:Exclude2
XCOPY "C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\share\*.*" "Programs\GTK\share\" /E /H /G
::/GTK lines
Del Exclude1
Del Exclude2
Del Exclude3

Enjoy.

nPOPuk

After a very shot test of what this small email app can do. I have to say I'm very much pleased. This app is not only smaller than Thunderbird Portable, it does nearly everything else with a smaller amount of files to work with. And if you save your passwords, it encrypts thems for you!

Don't get me wrong, the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird is good. I like that it integrates with PGP/GPG. But I need something that encrypts my passwords should I choose to save them.

nPOPuk gets my vote.

Portable IM clients(alternatives)

I've discussed Meebo and Pidgin/GAIM for portable IM. But I thought I'd give you some variety and choice in case you wanted something different. Here are some other that are portable as well:

Miranda
EasyMessage
TrillianAnywhere

I had some things keeping me busy from posting but I'll cover these in my next posts.

Pidgin Update

Since Pidgin updated, so shall I. Enjoy.

Pidgin-Portable 2.1.1

PortaPuTTY

Putty is a great Telnet/Remote access tool, I though I'd give it a mention. While the windows binary may write setting to the windows registry. Socialist Sushi has made a package that runs portable for your pleasure. PortaPuTTY is everything you love about PuTTY with out the registry use. I could plug into Putyy-Portable, but that uses a registry file and isn't much different from running Putty from a batch file calling different system variables(massive lack of stability/capability). Sorry John, I have to go With SS on this one, PortaPutty is the winner for this post.

http://socialistsushi.com/portaputty/

A portable pidgin for everyone else.

I'm not taking any credit for this, I just followed the directions from the official web site.

Here is what (may) be featured in the zip:

Pidgin Encryption
Pidgin OTR

No changes were made to the plugins, they are already portable. If there are any feature requests, I'll take them into consideration. The theme is MS windows. But if you peek over the how to page you'll know how to change it.

Pidgin(7zip)
Packaged with 7 zip.

Portable-Pidgin revisited

Seems the makers of Portable Gaim finally spat out a portable build of Pidgin(I thought 99% of the work was done for them already). I'm going to take a peek at it just to see if it encrypts passwords. Pidgin was portable with a few modifications(directory structure and renaming one file) the only thing it didn't do was encrypt passwords. I hope they did something about that.

They wouldn't just upx the the "build" and then slap their name on it. Because that would be dishonest.

There is also a copy of Pidgin-Encryption and Pidgin-OTR that are supposed to be portable. I'll have to take a peek at these too. I was running the official plugins (Encryption/otr) from my portable build, and they ran portable. If there isn't anything outstandingly different, I won't be surprised will I?

Update
The plugins Haller claims to have made portable, already were portable. All he did was UPX them and slap his name on them. And as for his Portable release of Pidgin, there isn't any real improvements. If you save your passwords, they get saved as plain text. But he did a nice job upx it didn't he? If you really need that 10mbs of space on on your USB device, by all means go with Haller's release, otherwise just follow the directions from the official site(it takes about five minutes).