There’s a lot going on in the Chatsum lab right now. We recently released live links into the chat stream making it easier to follow people around the web. We’ve tightened up the server and installed caching engines all over the place ready to take on more users. Some exciting features are being added to the member profile pages, the OS X widget is now at internal beta stage and we’re about to start on the user blocking code.

Throw the new puppy on the left into the mix and you get a faster turnaround on your member page IE compatibility testing and a decent enough machine for us to start developing an IE native version of Chatsum. Virtual PC just wasn’t doing it for us anymore.

As if all that wasn’t enough we’ll also be moving this site to a different server and releasing a version of the extension compatible with the latest version of Flock as soon as we can.

Phew! Anything else? Oh yeah, a user preference to default to page or site mode.

Damn last week’s Carson Web Summit was great! Chatsum got a mention in Tom Coates‘ talk and Joshua Schachter’s presentation on Delicious gave us lots to think about. After Joshua’s talk Lee and I looked at each other and both said “we’ve got to open the beta” and so that’s just what we’re planning to do. However we first need to do a little bit more work getting everything ready and unfortunately we’re both pretty busy at the moment with other (read paid) projects, but we’re planning on getting the Member pages built and then opening things up.

We know things have been a bit quiet out there in Chatsum land and this is one of the main reasons we want to open up the beta. Until then we hope you don’t mind waiting.

So it’s been a quiet week in Chatsumland and for that we are eternally sorry. Lee was ill for half of it and money work forced me to spend less time on the upgrades than I would have liked. Having said that we have made what we think is pretty good progress. You should now be able to see some new features in Chatsum (if you can’t: just log out, close the sidebar, open the sidebar again and log in) one of which we think will really change the way Chatsum can be used.

You’ll see in the picture attached to this post the new ‘Current users’ list that tells you who else is looking at the current page. It’s now really easy to follow a link to a currently active site and directly address other users. So, if you’ve got used to lurking on sites just listening in on the chat, be prepared to be outed and spoken to.

Other new features are: a completely rewritten and hopefully more stable Chatsum engine; scrolling in the chat window; user preferences; dynamic timestamps and bug fixes. Below is the updated road map and bug list. Enjoy!

Roadmap

1. Scrolling in chat window.

2. Member log-in and change details page.

3. User preferences (e.g. for opening links in same window or new tab).

4. Member profile pages and links to them from the chat transcript.

5. Live ‘Users in this room’ list.

6. User blocking.

7. Buddy lists.

8. More complex SPAM reporting/moderating/blocking.

9. Badges and banners to link to member profiles and where you’re chatting now.

10. Dynamic transcript timestamps.

11. Skins

12. API

Known Bugs

1. Posts sometimes appear twice in the chat transcript.

2. Posts from room A sometimes appear in room B when switching from one to the other.

3. Non-Latin text appears garbled on the Chatsum website.

4. Staying in a room for a very long time causes sluggish behaviour.

5. The Ctrl-Alt-C shortcut sometimes fails to toggle the Chatsum sidebar (Note: this appears to be a Firefox bug, at least on Mac OS. If you experience this bug try clicking on the Firefox window and pressing Ctrl-Alt-C again. If it still doesn’t work please let us know).

6. OS X Firefox in some cases refuses to install the extension. We’ve had reports of the url not loading or of the extension appearing in the Extensions window and then disappearing. Any more reports from people having trouble installing would be great as we haven’t been able to recreate this in the lab.