Noah Slater of semtard vapourware fame recently demonstrated to me how to write and extremely simple IRC bot in shell scripting.
The bot below is extremely simple, it simply identifies itself, joins a channel then sends a message to a channel.

A while ago, back in October 2007, I was learning PHP, or attempting to learn it, and stuck with a load of DVDs etc, I decided to build a library system for them so I knew what I had and where they were.
td-library was born.
A really sucky PHP application, unfinished, unpolished and written by a newbie, td-library barely does what it was intended to do and at the moment I am still without a system which I can easily update to do all this for me.