Many of our customers try to user Google Apps for your domain with Olark. Unfortunately Google does not tell system administrators to configure Google Talk to work with external XMPP(Jabber) networks by default. This leads to a lot of problems when a customer has Google Apps for their domain, but does not have the required SRV records to work with Olark.

We’ve always pointed out customers to: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143

But, this doesn’t always solve the problem, because sometimes it takes a while for ISPs to update their DNS cache, and it’s hard for our customers to double check their ISP, or their own attempts at setting SRV records. That is until now!

Introducing the Olark Google Apps for your domain SRV Checker. Using the below tool, you can now finally see if your SRV records are set correctly.

Olark Google Apps for your Domain SRV Checker

Astute users may have noticed that we very quietly rolled out a new feature last week: Hab.la now works directly with your existing Google Talk account. Here’s how to add Google Talk to Hab.la.

First, log in to Hab.la and go to the account settings panel. You’ll notice a new section for “Other Chat Networks”.

Click on the “Google Talk” link and add your Gmail address. Then press “Save.”

GTalk will now show up as active.

Now log in to Google Talk. Hab.la will send you some chat invitations over the next few minutes. Approve each one by clicking “yes.”

That’s it. Now, when you’re signed in to Google Talk, visitors to your web site will be able to chat with exactly as they can with your regular Hab.la account. In addition, any other Jabber-based chat network that supports the server-to-server protocol (“S2S”) will work in the exact same manner.

We’re working on connecting more big chat networks with Hab.la, but each one has its own quirks. Look for more options in the coming months.

I just wanted to reiterate how freakin amazing Hab.la with automatic translation is.

Say someone visits your site and greets you in a foreign language. As soon as a particular language can be detected, seamless translation between your chosen language (english in our case) and that of your website visitor begins. Heck, you don’t even have to personal know what language to translate from—- this is all done automatically for you.

See the Screenshots for a better idea of how this works or Check out a live example with instructions on how to do this yourself. There is also a previous post of which you may want to take a gander.

Ever start chatting with a visitor on your site only to realize that you had no idea what they were saying? It happens to us at Hab.la all the time.

Luckily for you, and us Google released a translation API today, which let’s site authors make AJAX calls to translate text in real-time.

I added a plugin to hab.la to do just this. The site operator can specify a language they would like to receive chat’s in, and Hab.la will work with Google Translate to make it’s best judgment about translating the messages.

Google’s funky JavaScript loader makes this plugin a little bit complicated to install, but the extra effort is definitely worth it (if you need your chats translated).

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi">
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("language", "1");
</script>


<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.hab.la/js/wc.js">
<script type="text/javascript">
config = wc_config();

// Choose the google abreviation for your language:
//i.e. en, it, ft, de

config.vars["language"] = "en";

// enable the plugin
config.vars["enableLanguageTranslation"] = 1; 

wc_init("1776-526375-10-3058",config );
</script>

The complete list of languages, and more details about the plugin can be found at : http://static.hab.la/examples/translation.html (It is still very much a work in progress so as always we appreciate your feedback!)

That’s it!

Remember you can already customize all the text fields and colors in hab.la, and even skin it useing custom CSS. Read more on the wiki.

More updates on their way!

A few you might have noticed that if you have google analytics and hab.la on the same page, you’ll start seeing statistics about hab.la in google analytics.

I just spent some time updating the GoogleAnalytics plugin for Hab.la.

Hab.la generated events will now show up at ‘/habla.events/’ as opposed to ‘/habla/’ i.e. ‘/habla.events/receive_message’

So if you wish to filter these events, you should do use the new path. You can also disable the Google analytics plugin by setting:

config.vars["disableGoogleAnalytics"] = true;

Finally, we have stopped logging the ‘chat_started’ event for now because it was essentially firing every time the hab.la box loaded when an operator was available. I have some ideas about how to fix this in the future, but I think the existing events will work fine for now.

The events we log to google analytics are:

"receive_message"
"send_message"
"window_expanded"
"window_compressed"
"window_closed"

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!

I spent today honing my Google gadget writing skills. Unfortunately Google Gadgets that work on Google Pages are wrapped in IFRAMES so I couldn't make a gadget to embed the floating Hab.la into your Google page. (Though you can still paste the HTML into Google page) We need to do a little bit more testing before we add the Gadget to the various Google Gadget directories. The below link is pretty much useless, as it will just add the Hab.la widget to your iGoogle web page.

What you really want to do is log into your google pages account (Pages.Google.com) and edit a page on your site, near the bottom of the screen is an [Add Gadget link], choose to add a gadget from a URL, and as the URL specify: http://static.hab.la/html/habla_gadget.xml
 
You'll need your Hab.la Site-ID which can be found on your account page, pull out the series of numbers passed to the wc_init() function. If you examine the code wc_init("___THIS_IS_YOUR_ID___")

That's it for now, in other news I've been revamping the JavaScript API that drives the display of hab.la on your page, and pretty soon there will be documentation explaining all the cool things you can do with your hab.la window.

One last thing, the MySpace and BlogSpot Hab.la tutorials are on their way :-)