For Mark, Mick and i’s homework this week we were asked to make a chat program for our content. Unfortunately the back end of that and setting it up on our existing service proved to be a bit hard as I have very little javascript experience. We’re close to getting it implemented though. Here’s a poor preview.
What’s important about doing it this technical way is that we started to really think about why we needed it. That brought up a lot of interesting ideas. Specifically, we are starting to narrow what we think we want the website to be, a kind of one stop shopping of skill building with a fun edge. Basically, through looking at the permissions of being able to join the chat the idea came up that maybe we could record the chat real-time against the video content the chat went alongside. Then it came that wouldn’t be neat to consistently be able to comment any time and then create a user filtering system like stackoverflow of voting comments into importance. I think this is where we felt our chat client should rest. That being said, there’s a lot of back end that goes into something like that. Hence, it’s unfortunately not totally done yet. I will update this page when there is a working version.