Thoughts on live chat 
Sign up | Plans | Help | Contact
Tags


Filed under

nickname

 
February 24, 2008

More features and tweaks than I will remember

So I’ve been fanatically working on Hab.la recently.

Here are today’s set of updates:

Cool tricks for for Operators:

/follow - in a chat session will cause hab.la to tell you whenever that visitor changes pages.

/nofollow - disables following that user

/nick [nickname] - changes your nickname in a specific chat session

Nickname related fixes:

Visitors can assign themselves a nickname by typing /nick [nickname] in their chat window.

If using Adium or Meebo this nickname will appear on your buddylist. For other XMPP (Jabber) clients the buddy’s status message will read ‘nickname: http://url’.

It may be time to revisit my blog post about manually assigning a nickname to logged in users. As this feature will now benefit users of other instant messengers (i.e. Pidgin, iChat, OpenFire).

Other Fixes:

Hab.la will no longer notify the operator whenever a user changes pages. It will only notify the operator of page changes when the operator is actively chatting with the web-user. If you want to see a visitor’s path through your website use the /follow command.

Better caching on the backend to speed up each individual RPC call. I.e. Hab.la should be faster for all now!

Filed under  //   backend   frontend   javascript   nickname   updates  

Comments [0]

December 4, 2007

Livehelp on a site without JavaScript?

My last blog post talks about how you can link to hab.la from websites that don’t support JavaScript (i.e. eBay and Myspace). I’ve taken that blog post and converted it into a tutorial page, here, to make it easier to read and fill out.

In other news, site owners using Hab.la now have two options when it comes to changing the nickname displayed when they are chatting with site visitors.

Using Account Settings

  1. Log into Hab.la
  2. On the “my Hab.la” page select “settings”
  3. Change the ‘Nickname’ value
  4. click ‘update’

Using JavaScript

Replace your existing Hab.la code with the below code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.hab.la/js/wc.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
config = wc_config();
config.vars["local_name_override"] = "Your display name";

wc_init("___YOUR__ID____",config );
</script>

Filed under  //   display   ebay   hab.la   javascript   livehelp   myspace   name   nickname   tutorial  

Comments [0]

October 29, 2007

The names of your visitors could appear on your buddylist

So, we have only confirmed that this feature works with adium, pidgin, and meebo. (All libpurple based chat clients).

However, it has worked consistently for us. If you want to play with this feature visit your website and type: /nick nickname into the chat box, the name of the buddy representing you on your buddylist should change from webuser### to nickname.

We are close to adding an interface element to let user’s specify this option on their own.

Filed under  //   buddylist   frontend   interface   jabber   javascript   nickname   roster   ui  

Comments [0]

October 28, 2007

Shhhhh. Quiet. Alpha feature release..

Ok, so I am impatient, but new features do need people testing them, and what is a better way to test a feature than to push it upon all users of hab.la.

To be fair, it is tested and stable. The reason it is still in beta is because it is not compatible with all Jabber clients. I.e. it does not work with iChat; however, it does work with Adium and Meebo.

So without further ado, the new feature is the ability to assign usernames to your web site’s visitors using javascript. (i.e. it is possible to replace webuser1 with cms user, so when you chat with your visitors you’ll know WHO they are. So instead of webuser1 on your buddylist, you’ll now see “Donald Trump” or “John Doe” or “insert registered visitor to your site here”.

So, as per policy, I am not going to provide explicit documentation and howto’s, (especially since this is an alpha feature), but here’s the trick, write some code in your CMS to insert the user’s name into the javascript that start’s hab.la. The config variable you need to add is:

config.vars["force_nickname"] = "CMS USERNAME";

So you could imagine writing some code in PHP that looked like:

<?php
if($user_is_logged_in && $username){ 
?>
config.vars["force_nickname"] = "<?php=$username?>"; 
<?
}
?>

Remember, we are still beta testing this feature, so please let us know if you run into any problems. We know for a fact that it will probably NEVER work with iChat, so I guess we’ll encourage everyone to use Adium :-), or at least anyone who wants super cool features of this sort :-).

For more information about customizing the Hab.la window, see: .. customizing-the-chat-window

Filed under  //   backend   cms   custom   habla   javascript   livechat   nickname   plugin  

Comments [0]