I setup an IRC Based Homepage Chatroom - ☆ ∙ Web Projects

Hey There!

idk if this qualifies as a "Web Project" per-say, but its for my main site so I figure this was the best spot!

I've been wanting to try and somehow integrate a chatbox on my home page that I could interact with in useful ways -- mainly get notified on my phone when people pop in and say hi -- and I think I finally have it working well! If you just want to see it, come chat with me at my homepage on the left sidebar!

For some background: Previously, I was using cbox for this chat box. It worked, but it didn't really feel like a very useful chat room as it was basically just a guestbook since I was never able to be on when others popped into my site, so I wanted to try and find a way to improve this. At first, I was looking for a way to integrate a Matrix client, as that's my open source communication protocol of preference, but there doesn't seem to be any good matrix clients implemented in pure JavaScript

. Eventually, I stumbled across gamja, which is a simple IRC client implemented entirely in JavaScript, and that let me implement this as it is now.

As it stands, this is the setup:

Ergo is running as the IRC server (irc.dakotamarshall.net:6667)
gamja is deployed at https://irc.dakotamarshall.net, configured to automatically connect to my IRC server, and join the #net-chat channel
An iframe on my site that automatically loads the gamja page

And with this, I have a fully functional chat on my site, that people can pop in and out of, and I can keep an IRC client up on my phone to say hi when people pop in.

BUT, I don't really use IRC that much, and would prefer to use Matrix still.... enter heisenbridge, a IRC -> Matrix bridge. Setting this up let me connect the #net-chat IRC channel to a room on my matrix server, #net-chatting:dakotamarshall.net. So now I have a Matrix room that I get messages from my website chat room on!

If you want to come stop by and say hi, Id love some testers (and company

)!!

Visit my website and use the chatbox
Visit the dedicated IRC page
Connect to the IRC server using your preferred IRC client (irc.dakotamarshall.net:6667) and join the #net-chat channel
Join the public matrix room #net-chatting:dakotamarshall.net

Let me know what yall think, or if you want any more detail!

Looking up irc.dakotamarshall.net * Connecting to irc.dakotamarshall.net (107.137.198.177:6667) * Connection failed ((167772427) error:0A00010B:SSL routines::wrong version number) Are you sure this is a SSL capable server and port?