Oct
19
Review: Chat Widget for your Blog, Powered by Adobe Flex

Posted: 19th October 2007
Tags: Flex, RIAs, Ruby on Rails
Posted in Flex
Comments: 2 Comments »

Following my previous article I discovered Chatopica an excellent chat widget, you can integrate directly into your blog. Current topics are related to programming and design but custom topics are coming soon.

Chatopica is created by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of SearchCoders, Tom being the presenter of the excellent eSeminar on an Easy MVC approach to developing flex apps, I blogged about.

What you can currently chat about in Chatopica

Currently Chatopica offers the following topics, but the guys are working on the ability to create custom topics and you can register to be notified when this feature is added on their homepage :

Adobe Flash (Flash Programming and Design)
Adobe Flex (Flex Programming)
Adobe Photoshop
AJAX (AJAX Programming)
Book Club (Discussions on Books and Novels)
Chatopica (Chatopica)
ColdFusion (ColdFusion Programming)
Java (Java Programming)
PHP (PHP Programming and Web Development)
Python (Pythonistas Unite!)
Ruby On Rails
Video Games

I like the widget so much that I have added two topics to my own blog, so if you would like to chat with like minded developers about Ruby on Rails or Adobe Flex you can access these here anytime:

http://www.clockobj.co.uk/flexchat (For Adobe Flex Chat)
http://www.clockobj.co.uk/railschat (For Ruby on Rails CHat)

Note There are not many Rails developers on here yet, but if you are in the Rails community, please spead the word.

Or even better, why not add this widget to your own Flex or Rails blog / website!

Adding a Chatopica topic to your own site..

Adding Chatopica to your own site is a piece of cake, simply visit the Chatopica Topics section, choose the topic(s) you would like on your site and copy and paste the one line of Javascript into the HTML of your page. For those that have added other widgets to your sites, you will be familiar with this. It’s that easy. (That’s why I pasted one into this article.)

Overview of Features

When Chatopica first loads, it automatically assigns you a guest ID. You can change this at any time by clicking on the assigned guest ID in the top bar and entering a new nicname / display name. If you enter a name currently in use, the system smartly handles duplicate by appending a unique ID to the duplicate name you entered. If you don’t like this you can simply change it to something else.

Another nice feature for developers is that you can click the code button and copy and paste in, some source code. Not only does chatopica colorize your code, it also folds it so those who are not interested in seeing the code can ignore it without it filling their chat screen, while those that are interested can click the {} icon to expand the source code.

Chatopica, like many chat clients automatically scrolls to the latests message posted. A nice feature to Chatopica is the ability to turn the Autoscroll feature off by clicking the padlick icon in the bottom right of the widget. This then prevents the chat window from scrolling to the bottom when someone posts a new message, which is handy while examining someones source code.

With the ability to create your own custom chat room coming soon, we will all be able to add a little peice of Chatopica to our websites and blogs.