Do you have a website? Do you use Google analytics to keep track of your traffic? Well, now you can use it to keep track of how your visitors use hab.la too!

I implemented a cleaner plugin architecture, and implemented a Google Analytics Plugin as my first task. Essentially, all important hab.la events will now be logged to Google Analytics.. Want to know how many visitors sent a message to an operator, or opened the chat window? Just log into Google Analytics and look for the content items "/habla/sendmessage" or "/habla/expandchat".

This plugin is automatically enabled for all Hab.la users that have Google Analytics and Hab.la installed on the same page, if you would like to disable this logging, add the configuration option:

config.vars["disableGoogleAnalytics"] = true;

I think we are probably the first, if not the only livehelp / livechat provider to offer built in configuration free Google Analytics integration. [I am 100% sure we are the only company to offer this free of charge.] – Hopefully someone will throw up a tutorial, or some more documentation on this feature soon!

Ok, We should have had support for automatic link highlighting in our first release, but we didn’t. Now we do. The code that drives this additional functionality isn’t super-duper amazing, but it gets the job done.

To summarize, if you type a url into hab.la, like “http://www.aol.com” it will now appear as a link, i.e. http://www.aol.com. This isn’t very tricky. The cool part is that if the URL is external to your site, i.e. not on the same domain that the hab.la window is currently running, we will load the link inside of an Iframe with the hab.la window. Thus, if you send someone a link that refers them to a remote site you can still continue talking to them using hab.la’s inline floating chatbox.

You can turn this feature on and off using the config object.

Code
//Turn parsing links on (0 for off)
config.vars["parse_links"] = 1;

Hahah.. Ok, we should have added away message support a while ago, but we finally have enough beta testers so that people will complain when important features are missing. Thanks beta testers :-)

Anyway, today’s new feature is the ability to have Hab.la show your away message in the chat box, or hide the box when you are away (Hab.la does not support idle time based awayness – yet)

At some point I’ll write a nice tutorial, but until then:

The code to hide the chat box when you are away or unavailable:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.hab.la/js/wc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load Config
config = new wc_config();
config.vars["hide_not_available"] = 1;
config.vars["hide_when_away"] = 1;
wc_init("SITE_ID", config);
</script>

The code to show your away message in Hab.la when you are away

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.hab.la/js/wc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load Config
config = new wc_config();
config.vars["show_away"] = 1;
// show the away message in the header/ status bar of the habla window
config.vars["show_away_as_header"] = 1;
wc_init("SITE_ID", config);
</script>

As an aside, we are currently using typo, and I have no idea how I am suppose to display large blocks of CODE, it seems that I have to block each line individually, which is a huge pain.

Ok, I’ve already posted about this, but I don’t think I made it clear how cool this feature was. Consider this example:

You run a small business website, and you aren’t around 24/7. Perhaps you want to offer livehelp for a few hours in the afternoon, or just when you happen to be sitting at your computer. Of course you don’t want to turn your customers off with the fact you aren’t around at 4:00pm, in fact you don’t want people to know you offer livehelp unless you are available and ready to help them instantly.

Here’s how Hab.la comes to the rescue!

We allow you to configure hab.la to only show the chatbox, when you are actually available. There is no “Live help is unavailable” or “Live Help is away”, any customer that sees the livehelp window, sees that livehelp is available, thus, no one will know that you are only on livehelp 12:00 to 1:00am every other Sunday, but the people that happen to catch you online will be impressed with your dedication and drive – working Sunday at 1:00am, now there’s a store I’d like to do business with.

The code to do this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/wc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// Load Config
config = new wc_config();
config.vars["hide_not_available"] = 1;
wc_init("SITE_ID", config);
</script>

I should really give you guys a nice overview of all the other cool things you can do with the new Hab.la API. If there’s something in particular you are trying to do, but don’t know how to (because there IS currently no documentation), please let me know and I’ll give you an example.

So I spent all day today refactoring Habla’s JavaScript client code. I separated the chat server client from the chat window, and added a bunch of event handlers that developers can override to plug in their own functionality. This also makes it a lot cleaner to write code that responds to message receipts and operator status updates. (Sometime I’ll even write some documentation. .hahaha)

Soon, and I don’t know how soon, I’ll start rolling out some tutorials that explain how easy it is to override Hab.la events to create some really neat mash-up opportunities.

This refactoring also makes us closer to having a really nice YAHOO UI (YUI) version of Hab.la. So be on the lookout.

BTW, these changes haven’t been pushed to production yet – give us a few days to test them.

Don’t get too excited, we plan on refactoring the entire JavaScript client to make it much easier for developers to make hab.la work with other UI libraries.

However, I have demonstrated that with a few minor modifications (soon to be pushed to production) Hab.la can be dropped into a Yahoo UI panel without too much trouble:

http://static.hab.la/test/yahoo/test.html

The method to fit it in is quite ugly. As I said making the Javascript client more developer friendly is at the top of our (my personal) list.