Thursday Tip Day: Adding google chat to your wordpress blog

Posted February 28, 2008 * Comments(5)

You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you.

The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets). Paste the code into a new text widget, surrounding it with <ul></ul> tags to space it out a bit if you like.

Having had some fun getting php and javascript code to work in a sidebar widget, I expected this to be a lot more difficult!

First impressions: actually responding to someone takes a few steps. You get notification in a web page which wants to open a new chat window, rather than integrating with whatever form of google chat you already use. It’s slower too. Despite that, and notwithstanding the increasing need to control IM status, without getting overwhelmed by offers to chat, I like it!

5 Comments so far

  1. Bingo Jons on February 28th, 2008

    If you want to get the straight html link to your talk code–(i.e. so you’re not stuck with the “google balloon”) check out this wizard. You just put your code in and you’re ready to go:

    http://flashandburn.net/chatBackLink/

  2. admin on March 3rd, 2008

    Hey,

    Thanks for the link, that’s really handy!

    Thanks for popping by,

    Jo

  3. Lakshmanan on March 6th, 2008

    Can you please provide step by step guide to add google chat in wordpress blog.

  4. admin on March 7th, 2008

    Hi Lakshmanan,

    If you click on the link above you’ll get to a page with some code for your gadget (assuming you’re signed in with a valid google account). Edit that code until it looks like you want it to look, then copy it to your clipboard. Assuming you have a wordpress theme that supports sidebar widgets, simply add a text widget to your sidebar and paste the code into it. That worked for me!

    If you don’t have a widgetised theme, I assume you need to create an iframe in your template somewhere and paste the code into that but I don’t know exactly how that works as I tend to stick to widgets.

    Hope that helps!

    Jo

  5. ïîðíî îíëàéí on October 27th, 2008

    I esteemed yours blog,
    thanks the author a lot of useful to myself have found..

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