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Vol. 1, No. 38 All right, cats and kitties. Dig this vibe I'm laying on you: Today we are going to take it easy. No elaborate languages to learn, no tricky cross-platform work-arounds, no complicated protocols to engineer or tedious charts to memorize. No, today we get to make use of code that's already written for us, nifty code that installs with minimal fuss and does what it's supposed to. Aahhh, that's so nice. The software is Voice Chat, provided by your friends at Tripod, courtesy of THEIR friends at Evoke. It runs on the server, in a little pop-up window, and adds a certain slick function to your site. Can you guess what the function is? That's right! Voice chat! Using their computers' built-in microphones, visitors to your site can chat with you and amongst themselves; using the vocal cords Nature gave them, just like that twentieth-century technology, the telephone, or, even more shocking, the quaint prehistoric innovation of face-to-face speech. But without the horrible awkwardness of leaving their workstations, of course. Thank heaven. And so, begone, inconveniences of typed chat! Now no longer do you have to miss nuances of expression, rely on lame little smiley faces for emotional content, or wonder in vain what your new e-friend's Glasgow accent sounds like (though if it turns out to be totally incomprehensible, perhaps typing is best for you after all). A Voice Chat chat room can accommodate as many as 20 people, although the limitations of the human social apparatus and brain tend to make smaller groups generally more comfortable. The chat code lives on the Tripod server, and in fact it's already installed there. All you have to do is put a snippet of JavaScript on your page to call up the chat client in a pop-up window. You can get the JavaScript from this page.
But let's take a look at the code here anyway, to see how to customize
aspects of the client, and also to review a teeny bit of JavaScript,
just so our brains don't totally atrophy this week. Here it is:
<script language="JavaScript"> The variables you can modify change the colors of the various aspects of the client: the different volume readouts, the backgrounds, the text, and the buttons. (Got that? Just the colors. The variable SpeakerVolume doesn't change the speaker volume, just the COLOR of the speaker volume DISPLAY. Okay?) They are in the form of hex codes, which you are no doubt familiar with from HTML like <BODY BGCOLOR="00FF00">. The codes are preceded by 0x00, which lets the server know that they are hex codes. You can just ignore that part. I just told you that they're hex codes, and unlike a computer, you don't need to be told each time. As in HTML, the first two digits (after the 0x00) represent the proportion of red on a hexadecimal scale from 00 to FF (which translates to "0 to 255" in normal numbers); the second two digits represent the proportion of green, and the last pair of digits represent the proportion of green. But you knew that, you knew that. HINTS, POINTERS, AND TIPS 'O THE TRADE:
It's a good idea to put a little explanatory text on your site to explain to the users what exactly is going on with this pop-up window, and how to use it. You'd want them to do the same for you, right? WD40 is fantastic for lifting smudges from painted walls. Spot-test in an inconspicuous place first. RESOURCES: Chart of hexadecimal Web color codes. Understanding Scottish slang.
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