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May 17, 2008

Hey, I know you! -- Better Visitor Information

Ben wasn’t kidding when he said he added features that help you as an operator know key information on the fly about your visitors.

To start, status messages have been beefed up. Not only do you see the current location of the visitor as you did before, you know whether they are a return visitor (denoted by the text “returning” as well as the asterisks Hab.la user icon) or a new visitor (denoted by a plain Hab.la user icon).

You also get to see the number of pages the user has visited in the current session. All of this can be extremely useful in determining who you might want to initiate an outward chat with.

See the screenshot of a status message rollover in Adium:

But wait there’s more!

When a chat begins you also get to see the referring site the user navigated from before coming to yours. Now you can actually infer something about the person you’re talking to before you start talking.

Screenshot of a newly started chat in Adium:

At this point we’re looking to make this extra information as intuitive and easy to use as possible. And for this we need your help. Is the current system of displaying this new information in the status and icon counterintuitive, or does it do the job nicely? Let us know! We know an asterisks isn’t the best symbol out there to indicate a returning user— but what is?

Filed under  //   information   returning   user  

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February 24, 2008

Hab.la Yahoo UI (YUI) Take 2

A long time ago I demonstrated that you could wrap Hab.la in Yahoo UI. Well now you can wrap Hab.la in Yahoo UI, and have it look good at the same time.

The below example code is a complete hack, but uses an unmodified version of the main wc.js and a resizeable YUI panel to make a pretty nice Hab.la Window that you can drag around.

I don’t think it would be too hard to take this code, and wrap it up so that anyone could switch their Hab.la window over to the ‘cooler’ YUI version.

Hab.la + YUI == nice!

Filed under  //   css   hab.la   interface   javascript   style   user   yahoo   yui  

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November 14, 2007

Is it really after 3am, Damn

Anyway, there was a lot of Hab.la progress today. Roland, Kevin, and I held a jam session and hammered out fixes for many of the small bugs, and even managed to implement a few new features as well.

First of all Hab.la should work with iChat3, and with Spark (from ignite).

Second of all, Hab.la will now remember whether the chat window was open or closed as you browse a site. End users can even close the window and have it go away entirely until they receive a message from a site op.

And last, but not least I wrote a really ugly, really quick and dirty Hab.la color customization tool. you can check it out at:

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

This should help our less technically inclined users customize the colors of their hab.la window. without having to do extra work. I am really looking forward to the day where we support full fledged user templating – but my guess is it will be a while before that arrives.

Filed under  //   backend   experience   frontend   ichat3   javascript   spark   update   user  

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