Open Source Web Chat made Easy

AJAX Chat is awesome. Today a friend made a request for their birthday: could I help them setup a webchat for their website. At first I thought that this might require a lot of effort. I certainly wasn't going to write one. I asked whether a Java-plugin to an IRC server (a common solution) would do. No, preferably no IRC server and no Java. (Java is slow and ugly and requires plugin installation.) Perhaps something more AJAXy exists.

After only a couple minutes of Googling, prominently standing out was AJAX Chat. It's demo seemed near perfect with a few defects. "I could fix those" I thought, suppressing the dread of a long, protracted maintenance situation. I figured "Let's give it a try." It requires PHP and MySQL on the server, and my friend's account doesn't have either of those. Well, my hosting does, so perhaps we can just fiddle with a CNAME record for their domain and point it over.

So, in less than hour, I created a separate subdomain for this, I setup the DB for my account, I briefly reviewed the installation and security instructions for the software, I uploaded it, I did some minimal configuration, and, tada, it worked! Visitors need nothing beyond a JavaScript and cookie-enabled browser!

Then, over the course of another hour came some customisations. Adding registered users, modifying default login behaviour, add a purple-coloured stylesheet for default, change the default emoticon ascii (very necessary) and add a butler to the login page. Oh, and change the CNAME record, so it will hopefully appear like a seamless part of their website in a couple days time when the DNS change is propagated.

So, a neat gift in a minimal amount of time. Go computers. Now I'm sure they'll grow bored with it in a week's time :D