Add a Chat Room to Your Website

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Chat rooms are a cool addition to your website, but you should also know that they may bog down a web server...especially if it there's a lot of traffic. 

So if you know your room will be getting lots of visitors, make sure you have a web host like Powweb that can handle the bandwidth.

What You Need to Create a Chat Room

Before you install a room on your web server, you need to ensure that your web hosting company provides the right kind of platform.

To install the chat room I am about to recommend, your site needs to support Perl 5.0 and you need to have read/write access to a CGI bin.  If you're not sure about this, ask your hosting company.

If you pay for hosting, I can almost guarantee your host will support this script.

However, if you're using a free web host like Yahoo/Geocities or AOL, you will not be able to install the chat room script.  Most free web site providers do not grant the user appropriate access to run PERL scripts.

Downloading and Installing the Free Chat Room Script

Ralf's Chat is probably one of the easiest scripts to configure and install.  I installed this on a site that I used to run and it worked great.

First, you need to download the free chat room script.  If you do not have an unzipping/extracting utility, go to WinZip to download their evaluation version so you can unzip the files.

If you have Windows XP, you will already have the capability of unzipping and do not need to download any software.

The download file comes with instructions (ReadMe.txt) so you can learn how to edit the script to fit your needs.

Installation Instructions

1) Upload chat.cgi, chat2.cgi and config.pm (all in ASCII mode) somewhere on your server where cgi-scripts are allowed. 

For example, I would create a folder called "chat" inside your server's cgi-bin.

2) CHMOD the chat.cgi and chat2.cgi files to 755

3) Make a sub directory on your server called "data" in the same directory

4) CHMOD the data folder to 777 data

5) If you want logs: mkdir logs; chmod 777 logs

6) Run the chat script with http://yourserver.com/path/chat.cgi

In order to understand some of the instructions above, you'll need to know a bit about uploading files and changing modifications (CHMOD). If you need help with this, see my WSFTP tutorial.

Good luck and happy chatting!