How to Add a Chat Room to a Web Page

Series Summary

A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a notion that is evident with the advent of the Internet. The Internet carries various information resources and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer and file sharing, online gaming, and the inter-linked hypertext documents and other resources of the World Wide Web. In this free video series, a professional computer consultant demonstrates how to accessorize a Web page with fun features such as chat rooms and custom cursors. Find out how to create user passwords for a site and create a favorites icon for a home page. Also learn how to optimize a picture for a Web site. Watch this free video series and find out how to attract more visitors to a home page.

Video Transcript

"Did you know that IRC, the oldest and most widespread of the Internet chat protocols was invented in nineteen eighty eight? Hi, I'm Dan Afonso of Afonso Consulting and Enfold IT. And this is how to add chat to your website. Chat on your website sort of depends on a lot of technologies coming together and can be complicated or it can be as easy as you want, depending on who's software and who's services you want to use. About the easiest way to do it is option one. You're going to put a link up to someone else's chat room or to someone else's chat. This can be as simple as an AIM chat room, just a link to an AIM chat room. It could be a link to a Google talk chat room or it could be a link to some other sort of on line chat room that supports this.. Option two, very similar, is to use a third part chat application. Over here we have something, Free Chat Rooms from freejavachat.com. You sign up, you put a link to one of their chat rooms, and then everyone chats in that room. Same thing with ParaChat Basic, and there are countless other providers on the web.Be advised you are at the mercy of these third party providers, but it's simple and easy and gets you through the day. If you don't mind, this doesn't present the most professional of image, it's probably good enough for social sites and stuff where people just want to get together for some casual chatting. Now if you want more control, you have to actually implement the chat server. This is really the problem. There's a bunch of different approaches. One is to use a Sequel Server data base. I don't quite recommend this. It requires a lot of complex scripting on the front end. Another one is to use a Java IRC client and have an IRC server on the back end. That works well too. Whichever way you choose, just choose carefully for what you have available. If your service provider for your web host has already and IRC server, use it. There's no need to go reinvent the wheel, just put one of the many free Java IRC clients on there and call it good. One of those I can recommend, PJIRC, which is a Java client, it'll load up, has a lot of themes support, very easy and very well supported. If you want to implement the Sequel Server in the Ajax, PHP Open Chat does this and can be embedded in to your content management system and whatnot. So, here's a few options for you. Please go to these websites, check out their instructions and try which one works out for you. I'm Dan Afonso and that was how to add a chat room to your website."