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Google Chatback Replacement

Google recently released a widget called the Google Talk Chatback Badge. It's pretty cool. You place it on your website, and it displays your current online status and away message, and has a link such that anonymous website visitors can chat with you. Great.

As you may have noticed, I just did a site redesign, and the existing Chatback widget did not match my new color scheme. In fact, it was sort of jarring. So, in looking for ways to fix the situation, I ended up writing a similar service that, aside from depending on your Google Talk username, also depends on a stylesheet that you supply.

If you'd like to set it up to replace your Chatback widget, do the following steps:

1. Obtain the Google Chatback widget code chunk here.
2. Locate your chatback id. Mine is highlighted in the following code Google gave me.
   <iframe src="http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/Show?tk=z01q6......4irhg&amp;w=200&h=60" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" width="200" height="60"></iframe>
3. Use the following code instead of the Google widget code, replacing the highlighted parts with the URL of your desired stylesheet and your chatback id, respectively.
   <iframe src="http://web.jtolds.com/chatback/?stylesheet=http://path/to/css&tk=z01q6......4irhg" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" width="200" height="40"></iframe>
4. Modify your stylesheet to configure the presentation of your new Chatback widget (requires knowledge of CSS)

Project links Google Talk Chatback Badge Google's official chatback service page

Dependencies No dependencies are listed for this project. Hooray!