Tech Ravings

I have came across a really cool web application that is a chat client but for web sites. I’ve been playing around with it for a day or so now and even installed it on my blog at http://www.techraving.com. This allows me real time communication to my visitors, and maybe even you.

Meebo, Inc http://www.meebo.com allows you to join their community which reportedly sends around 80 million IM’s a day. A really neat thing about the rooms you can set is that video can be played for all to share. type in a web url and a snap shot is displayed in the media window. After becoming a Meebo user you can also access your MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Google Talk and Jabber accounts as well. Meebo Me widgets allow you to build a chat box for your web site as well. One option is strictly two-way, I chat with you and you chat with me or community chat. Registering for Meebo is relatively painless and quick with just an email verification. Setting up all the multiple types of IM accounts is also easy.

Creating the widgets is a different story. Once I realized that I could embed the room in a web page I had to make choices between public or private, with or without media player, could visitors post video but this depended on the size of the chat. I would also like to point out that the interface is completely browser based so you must keep a web page open. That’s a pain for a web developer like me. However my messages I miss are kept until the next time I log in.

All in all Meebo is a great application for providing my site with visitor interactivity. They have taken great steps in security as well which is a great thing. I’m still waiting to see how it handles spam though.

On May fourth we had a Cinco De Mayo party; I would love to believe they were celebrating my birthday (May 5) but that wasn’t the case. One of the activities was to draw the names of nine people who worked for PPP to go to postieCon in Vegas. As it turned out I was one of the lucky ones. A tenth person was to go as well but had to post a video for the posties to vote on.

So as a favor to me go to: and vote for Trevor or Eric!

The other day I had an application where I needed to pull an HTTPRequest from a sub domain. Unfortunately same domain policy kicked in and I couldn’t retrieve the needed information. The other bad thing was that these were static HTML pages as well with no server side ability to get the files.

I did some researching and found no information on how this might be solved, nor did I find any real information on server side techniques either.

The solution to static HTML used the ability of Linux’s cron and wget. I set up a cron job that ran a wget, every hour and copied the page into a new page located within the same domain as the app.

I write this because I would love to have any one who ran into and solved the same type of problem. Even server side solutions are welcome because frankly I didn’t find squat out there.