If you dont know what imacro is, you might want to check it out. It’s a firefox addon that can automate a lot of IM work that is usually done manually.
You can download it from here and read the documentation here
My next step is learning php, as that will give me even more automation power. Although I have a background in programming with knowledge of C , Visual Basic, Matlab and some other client side programming, php is the first server side programming I wish to learn and I hope its easy.