Chat Monitor

The Chat Monitor is a Mac dialog that displays the various discussions in the web-based chat rooms of your website. Follow the conversations in real time or post your own from a dialog on the Mac, instantly making your messages available on the web. Visitors to your site can even automatically be alerted that you are available for a chat!

The Chat Monitor gives you the convenience of the Mac while maintaining the accessability of the Web for the Chat participants. It allows you to make your own statement in any chat room on your website. You can also broadcast a message to all rooms, or post a private message to a particular visitor:

The Chat Monitor provides a list of who and how many are in the chat rooms of your site in the pop-up menu used to select the receivers of your statements.

Use Examples

Here are some examples of how the Chat Monitor can be used:

Teachers can use the Chat Monitor to keep an eye on the discussion of students in virtual class rooms on the web. The monitor allows the teacher to follow all discussions at the same time and to post comments to one or more rooms when needed. The teacher can also post private messages from the dialog for students that need tailored comments, without disturbing the disscussion of the other students.

On-line Customer Support will benefit from the convenience of the Chat Monitor. Support Chat Rooms can be made available on the Web for optimal accessability, while the support staff will be able to conveniently maintain one or more conversation in real time with the Chat Monitor. This makes on-line customer support efficient.

Personal Websites can use the Chat Monitor to allow others to come by and start chatting. Your computer become a virtual office allowing others to visit from their browsers and have a conversation with you or make it into a meeting.

WebMasters can keep an eye on the ongoing activities, and also make themself available for comments and questions when they are maintaining the site.

Let Them Know You are Available

The entity chat-monitor.alert provides an alert when the Chat Monitor is open, and nothing if the dialog is closed. You can use this to let your visitors know that you are available for a chat.

To use this feature, place the entity reference &chat-monitor.alert; in any HTML document where you want to tell the visitors that you are available. Interaction will take care of embedding the alert message depending on whether the chat monitor is open.

The alert message can be customized by clicking the button with an exclamation mark, or from the Entities dialog.

Installing the Chat Monitor Component

  1. Download the Chat Monitor archive.
  2. Unstuff the archive (most browsers will do this for you).
  3. Find the appropriate version of the component in the folder that best matches your version of Interaction.
  4. Put the component file in the Components folder of Interaction
  5. Restart Interaction to activate the component.

After installation, the Chat Monitor will be available as an item on the Tools menu.


This site is enhanced with Interaction.