Exotherm - Maintaining connection

I previously found that Exotherm tended to lose its connection to the FICS after a while of idling. That wasn't even due to the automatic one-hour idle log-out; the bot and the FICS just disagreed about whether it was online. Today I rearranged its FICS interface some more so that it will try to reconnect if it finds that the connection was lost. Also, after 5 minutes of no input or output, it will send a chat to itself through the server just to keep the connection alive. These changes should make it suitable for deployment as a long-running process on my server.