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Shoutboxes - More Communication Tools For Your Weblog March 17, 2006

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Of all the ways you can communicate with your weblog’s visitors, shoutboxes have the potential to be the most interesting. That’s because shoutboxes turn your blog into a chat room of one focused channel.

Over the past year, I’ve come across one shoutbox after another. Most of the freebies required you to register and then serve up popup or popunder ads after someone used the shoutbox. No good, at least not for me. I despise both types of ads, and wouldn’t wish them on my visitors.

Now while I’ve come across a few WordPress themes that incorporate a shoutbox, if you don’t want to use the theme, you’d have to extract the relevant PHP and mySQL code. This isn’t necessarily a simple endeavour. So a plugin is a much better, since it’ll probably work with most themes. The shoutbox plugin that I came across (by way of Ajaxian) is the Ajax Shoutbox aka Wordspew.

Ajax, if you’re not familiar with it, stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. It’s a new term for an  older technique that combines DHTML (Dynamic HTML) techniques but with XML (or XHTML) instead. Because the shoutbox reacts to new messages as well as mouseovers, etc., what the author, Andrew Sutherland, has done is written the code to make sure that your web server doesn’t suffer. The algorithm is mentioned on his page, if it interests you.

One word of caution. While the shoutbox looks great on Andrew’s website, it didn’t look so good on my theme. He does, however, have what he calls the Crimson Milk theme for WP, for which the shoutbox should work, and which I believe is packaged with the theme.

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Comments»

1. x hana x - June 19, 2006

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2. Nilaksh - July 11, 2006

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3. alice - January 29, 2008

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