Mibbit lets you setup your own chat widget and embed it on your site very quickly.  Setting the channel Topic is an important part of the process as it helps to signpost chatters to useful information and notices regarding your chat. To do this you need to be an Operator of the channel. Use:

/topic <topic line>

The topic is shown at the top of the chat window, URLs are displayed properly too. Channel operators often change the topic according to what’s happening any given day.

Message of the day (motd) is different and covers the entire IRC network, unlike the channel topic the motd doesn’t typically change, it’s always displayed at the start of the chat when a user joins. If you want to turn this off add &NoServerMotd=true to your Widget URL. You can see Mibbit’s motd here. Other IRC networks will have their own.

New to IRC?  Learn how to Register a Nickname and Register your own channel, it’s easy!

Popular hashtag search operators can be used to make the tweets relevant to the chat including use of the from:<user> and near:<location> as well as the usual keywords.  So to see worldcup tweets add &hashtag=worldcup. Twitter have a full list of the operators here.  Any if users want to turn off tweeting it’s a command on the menu – show/hide tweets.  See the wiki for how to.

We’re coupling up OAuth capability for Twitter now, our plans are to add the ability for you to allow users to send tweets from Mibbit if you wish.  In addition premium customers will be able to specify hashtags which get appended to the end of each tweet sent from Mibbit.

Look out for more announcements soon and let us know any feedback.

PS. I’m told that Kenneth has predicted the Netherlands will win the #Worldcup!

Websocket support has been ramping up amongst browsers lately, with Safari and Firefox joining in the party.

Websocket is a technology that allows your browser to communicate with a website efficiently to do realtime updates. This means that your connection with Mibbit will have less lag, and be even more immediate.

Chrome has supported WebSocket for some time now. They recently changed the WebSocket spec, which unfortunately is not backward compatible with the old spec (boo). Mibbit however, still supports both versions of the WebSocket spec (hooray!).

Safari is built using the same technology as Chrome, and with version 5 of Safari, you can now enjoy WebSocket support also.

Firefox developer builds (minefield) also support WebSocket.

Please do let us know if you ever have any problems connecting to Mibbit, and we will do all we can to help. There are many reasons why you may not be able to connect, including firewalls, blocking software, proxies etc which can interfere, but if you’re still unable to connect, we have a few tools which enable us to troubleshoot any issues.

We’ve been working hard on backend resilience, and our ability to cope with Network routing issues, DOS attacks, power outages and so on. We now have a good amount of failover and ability to cope when the unexpected happens.

Thanks again for using Mibbit