Chatting(IM) with local only bandwidth

As usual i love my local only bandwidth and recently decided to try and open the eyes of other people to this beautiful resource (at least till the new seacom cable is completed). So here is hoping that this helps someone out there.

Now in this day and age if you not using IM you are seriously loosing out. So i will now demonstrate how to use IM with your local only bandwidth so as not to inconvenience users after they are capped.

Tools

The only tool that we are going to use for this tutorial is Miranda IM , there are other alternative applications that you can use such as PSI .Each has its own upsides and downsides but i personally prefer Miranda due its ability to create add ins so easily.

Getting Started

1. Install Miranda , i am not going to explain this in detail as its too simple (really just click next all the way till the finish).
2. Once you have Miranda Installed you need to decide if you are going to be using to it later for International chatting or local only.
3. Once you have decided start Miranda for the first time.
4. When it asks to create a profile simply enter a name and hit OK , after that ignore everything and keep clicking cancel till you are left with only the main Miranda window as seen below.
   

   Main Menu , Not Logged In

5. If you are going to be using it for local only then the first thing we need to is disable all the plug ins that are not needed.
6. Click on the little Miranda Icon next to the statuses menu , then select options as seen below.
7. In the list on the left select the plug ins menu , you might have to scroll down to see this option.
8. After selecting the plug ins menu a list of enabled plug ins will be displayed on the right as seen in the picture below.
   

   Options menu with plugins de-selected

9. Here you will need to un-select the following . AIM Oscar Plugin , Gadu-Gadu Protocol , ICQ protocol , MSN Protocol and finally Yahoo Protocol. Note you do not need to disable these if you plan to use Miranda with your international account.
10. Once you have disabled the required protocols you need to restart Miranda buy exiting it and then starting it again , if you can not find Miranda it usually means that it has minimised to the task bar. Simply right click on it then choose exit while it is minimized to exit the application.
11. After restarting go back to the options menu as described in step 6.
12. Now select find the network menu and then select the Jabber Submenu .
13. Enter a username that you would like to use .Note this is not your Gtalk user name and can be anything that has not already been used on the server.
14. Enter a password of your choosing
15. In the login server enter jabber.co.za
16. If you have never created a user before then click the Register New User Button (Next to your user name)
17. Hit OK , the setup is all done now all that is needed is to login.
18. Open up the main Miranda Window and either via the statuses menu or the tiny network icons at the bottom of window set your status to online.
19. For the tiny network icons you can do this by click on the icon and choosing online.
20. For the statuses menu , simply click the statuses menu then select online.
21. For the more geekier users out there ,when  the main Miranda window is open simply press CTRL + 1 to go online.
22. Now that we are online we can start registering for the protocols we want to use via the jabber server.
23. Navigate to the service Discovery Menu as seen in the picture below.
    

    Navigatig to the Service discovery menu

24. Once you have selected the discovery option you will see all the services available for use. To use a service simple right click on it and choose register , the service will then promt for your user name and password for the requsted service. e.g If you register for the google talk service , when it promts you for a user name and password you will enter you google user name and password.
    

    Service Available On the server

25. After registerig you will notice the contacts for that service will now appear in the main window. At this point you are totally up and running and you can start grouping all your contacts if you want.

The Aftermath

After all of this you may have guessed (or not) that Miranda is really powerful but you can only truely start seeing this power after exploring the app a bit and getting a few custom plugins for the app. I will be adding a article soon that will explain the proces of creating bot that can be pretty useful :) .

You should also have realised by now that almost any thing that can be done via international bandwidth you can do using local only bandwidth.

As always please let me know where i could have done better in the Tutorial and please leave a comment if you do decide to use this article.

~stalkerh