Ever since I integrated Morti into my pChat chatroom script, I’ve noticed that several issues relating to performance have cropped up, along with other issues, as well. In an effort to correct these issues, I’m completely re-writing pChat from the ground up. In the interim, I’ve created a page to take the place of pchat, temporarily, where visitors can still chat with Morti. the address is the same (http://www.geekcavecreations.com/pChat/), and Morti still responds as always. Of course, the telescope command is inoperative with this new page, but that functionality will be continued and improved with pChat 2.0, as will some other features.

Along these lines, if there’s anyone here who is familiar with jQuery (the basis for the new page, along with all of the new enhancements) I would more than welcome any assistance offered. I’m still very much a novice when it comes to jQuery, though that’s slowly changing.

Dave, I really like the design of the page.  It is simple but yet visually appealing, and the graphic of Morti is very cool also.

Thanks, Victor. I like it a lot, too. Just modified the CSS, though. Uploaded the changes not 30 seconds ago. You may wish to refresh the page.

I see - so now it uses the full width of the screen, nice.    I don’t see any CSS changes though, no color changes.. what exactly did you change?    btw - the ‘Send’ button is on top of the ‘Send’ Textbox. . .but it is not much of a problem since it is over to the right a bit.  Not really an issue since there is a lot of room to type in the text box anyway.

  Of course I’m on Firefox with Ubuntu linux so…. probably not many others will notice, but just to let you know.

where did you get that graphic of morti ?  I’d like a graphic like that for my bot. . .. when my bot gets a GUI that is.

The changes to the CSS were minimal, all having to do with the left placement of the various items, such as the submit button. If there’s any way that you can take a screen shot of the page, and email me the image, I can try to see about “fixing” the positioning. It’s very difficult for me to code the page for *nix boxes, as I have as many of those boxes as you had Windows units.

As for the image of Morti, that’s a bit of a tale, in and of itself. I used to play Final Fantasy XI, where my character, MrMortimer, was a cute, whimsical little being called a Tarutaru. He was a VERY formidable Black Mage, who spent more time helping others, or playing silly little pranks (slipping a dead fish into a person’s pockets was a personal favorite) than he did actual adventuring. His favorite phrase when preparing to attack something was “FOR WINDURST!!!”, and when he found himself over-matched, which was fairly often, he would run away, screaming “Run, Morti! RUN!!!”

I played as MrMortimer, or Morti, as all my online friends called me, for over seven years, and I sorely missed the little guy. So much so that when I created my chat bot, I chose to model it after my long time “friend”, and alter-ego. Thinking of him now is actually bringing a lump to my throat, and the faint sting of unshed tears to my eyes. That image of Morti is a portion of a screen shot from the game.

Oh, YUCK! I really need to remember to break out the other browsers when I make new pages. Looking at the page in Chrome is a revelation, though not a good one. Back to the drawing board. :(

[edit]
Ok, it’s not the “right” way to do things (using tables to control presentation is considered “wrong” by most HTML/CSS experts, after all), but darn it, it works! The overlap of the button on the text box is now fixed for all browsers, and alignment is no longer an issue, either.
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I think it looks very nice. You can definitely design a whole lot better than I do. So, did you design the character a bit, or was it a standard figure (haven’t played many games the last 15 years or so :-(  )

Final Fantasy XI offers a choice of five “races” (Huume, Elvaan, Galka, Mithra, and Tarutaru), mostly with either male or female available (there is no male Mithra, and no female Galka).

Huume is human, of course, and Elvaan is an elf. Mithra is a mixture of human and feline (VERY sexy, actually. ), while Galka are hard to describe simply, other than to say they’re huge, powerful, somewhat animalistic in a generic sense, and have a tail like a kangaroo. they’re hulking, furry brutes, with pointy ears like a cat, and a bad attitude. Tarutaru are mostly human looking, but with long, pointy ears, slightly shorter than a jackrabbit, and a tiny, buttonesque nose, which is almost black in color. There are options for overall size, facial markings, and hair style and color.

I picked out the attributes Morti has because they best suited his whimsical, slightly sarcastic nature.

Wow.. so a lot of history behind the name Morti…cool..

yeah, the layout, and color, and design of the page is awesome, it is not ‘visually noisy’ like some designs… very good job.

One small ‘feature request’... will take you 2 seconds…  is if you can make the cursor go automatically back in the text box.. as i’m talking to Morti, I have to keep clicking it.

sorry for being a pain in the rear lol.. but should take only a second and i think visitors will like it.

It already should, Victor, unless the AJAX portion isn’t working for you. Or, wait a sec. Are you pressing the “Send” button each time? or hitting enter?

[edit]
Either way, I added a bit of code to “refocus” the cursor back to the text box. That should take care of it, any way you look at it. Thanks for pointing that out, Victor.
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Works now, both by clicking submit and pressing enter .. you the man!!

Hiii, when it’s up to design I might be able to give a few suggestions:
*In general, dark text on light background is read better than the other way around.
*Text areas which are very wide are hard to track with your eyes (many forums nowadays still use wide columns, whilst all research has shown that smaller columns are much better to read). Why don’t you resize to 600 pixels for example?
*Times Roman font is particular usefull for lots of text. Why don’t use a computer display font like Verdana?
*If a visitors resizes the width of a browser window, Morti disappears behind the text box
*For a nice layout, it would be good to align the left hand side of the text boxes, with the colons in the message history. In general, the less ‘lines’ you have in a design, the better.
*Why don’t you store the name of the user in a cookie?
*Have you considered to display Morti’s avatar in front of every line he says?

Just a few things, hope you don’t mind :-s

@Victor
Thanks for checking that out.

@Erwin

You make some good points, most of which I have already considered. I’ll address them in order:
While I would normally agree with you about choices in background and foreground colors, I have two reasons for “going against the norm”:

1.) My eyes are abnormally sensitive to changes in light, so overly bright pages (such as this one, actually) cause my eyes some minimal discomfort. I find in my own experience that lower levels of contrast make reading very much easier. this is not in any way a condemnation of this or any other site. It’s just the way it is.
2.) As my entire website uses this colour scheme, it would look out of place to change it. And please don’t make me change the colour scheme for my whole site? I’d never get anything done for days!

I agree that the message text box is a little big. Especially for users with smaller screen resolutions. I’ll adjust that a bit.

Regarding font family usage, I don’t set it. I let the browser/user have full control over that, rather than force them to use a font family they don’t necessarily want. If your browser isn’t already set to use a default font that’s to your liking, might I suggest that you investigate the possibilities your browsers provide?

The issue with Morti’s image being obscured by the text box should correct itself when I re-size the text box.

I actually tried just having the text boxes directly follow the colons, but that looked sloppy to me, so I aligned the left edges of the text boxes. Let’s just say that it appeals to my (possibly warped) sense of symmetry.

With the form being an AJAX driven form, and never leaving the page at all, there’s no need to save the name in a cookie, unless you think I should just hide the name text box after the initial input…

Actually, pChat places Morti’s avatar in front of every one of his lines, along with the avatars of each user in front of their text. This functionality won’t change. I just didn’t see the point of adding that functionality here, since this is meant to be a temporary page while pChat 2.0 is being developed.

And, of course, I don’t mind hearing advice and constructive criticism from you, or anyone who shows an interest in my work. I consider everyone here to be a mentor, of sorts, to me, and I value all of your opinions and thoughts. Please keep them coming.

Hmmm. Odd. While looking at Morti’s chat page in Firefox (latest version), with the window set to a size of 800x600 (the smallest I ever design for - Smart Phones can suffer!), the spacing between the submit button and Morti’s image is the same as the spacing between the word Message and the left border. I don’t see any overlap unless I set my window to less than 750 pixels in width.

Can you tell me, Erwin, what browser and screen size you’re using? OS would help, too.