Meebo Chat with Pidgin


Embed a chat window inside WISE?

MeeboMe Widget Meebo Me Widgets are one simple, popular, and free way to do this. These widgets require a recent version of Adobe Flash Player on the student's Web browser. Be aware that links you send through the widget are not clickable by the student.

You can chat with students using your Meebo Me Widget from Pidgin, so that: Meebo Me uses the XMPP (Jabber) protocol, so it is easy to monitor the faculty-side of a Meebo Me Widget through Pidgin. After you have created your Meebo Me Widget, use Pidgin to create a new XMPP account. The screenshot displays the details. Note that the Screen name matches the login name for your widget, the Resource is Pidgin, and the Server is meebo.org.



Automatically Authorize Meebo Me students

When you set this up, you will notice that you will be prompted to authorize a buddy request for each visitor to your Web page that includes the Meebo Me Widget, even if they do not want to chat with you. You can automatically authorize these buddy requests by using the the pidgin4lib plugin (right-click, save target/link as). Unzip the pidgin4lib.dll file and place it in Pidgin's plugins directory. Then enable it within Pidgin (Tools-->Plugins) and you will no longer see authorization requests from your Meebo Me Widget. The plugin will also authorize similar requests from MSN students.

The plugin also sets the new chat alert sound to repeat every 30 seconds until you send one reponse to the student, assuming you have sound alerts turned on.

Steps to install
  1. Set up a Meebo account.
  2. Create a Meebo Widget
  3. Place the widget html code into the Source of the Site Info in WISE.
  4. Download and install Pidgin
  5. Add your meebo account to accounts monitored by Pidgin.
    6. Meebo Me Widget2
  6. Download and add Plugin for Automatic Authorization
Benefits
  • Your now do not have to monitor two applications (Pidgin for IM and a Meebo Me Widget via a Web browser) simultaneously.
  • Your Meebo Me chats are centrally logged right along with your other Pidgin transcripts.
More instructions