We're not talking. Click image for source.
There’s a link to the left of this page – or at least, there is at the time of writing – saying “Chat with me now.” It’s a good link. It fires up the Google Chat thingy which means I can have a good, live chat with anyone, providing I’m online.
Problem is, it stopped working.
Now, I’m online a lot of the time, mostly from 9am to 5:30pm while working as a copywriter, and I’ve found this link really useful. I’ve helped people with random queries, passed links on to them, or just said ‘hello’, as you do.
It even helped Steve Waddington a while back. The notification came through that someone wanted to chat, and blow me darn wiv a fevver, if it wasn’t Wadds himself. Turned out he liked the chat link too, so I showed him my secret sauce and he included the feature on his newly revamped blog.
So I was a little dismayed to find out, purely by accident, that it doesn’t work any more. It says I’m offline when I’m online. If/when it does say I’m online, clicking the link gives a 404 Page Not Found error. This is Bad.
I’ve tried fixing it by disabling the old button and creating a new one, but no joy. I’ve done some searching around and it seems other people have the same problem, but there’s not a peep from Google support that I can see.
So I pinged – yes, pinged, that’s the new catch-all phrase for emailing, so I’ve heard – Wadds to ask if he was having the same problem. Yes, he is. And he also thinks this is Bad.
What is going on? It surely can’t be that something has borked – yes, borked, that’s what technical things do – without Google knowing?
So now I’m on Skype, as cooperbrendan, if you want to chat. I’ll put a nice button on the blog so you can click that instead. But it’s not as good as Google Chat because you need to be on Skype. And while a lot of people are on Skype, it’s not the same as being able to chat to anyone.
It just goes to show, you really can have everything set up just so but someone, somewhere, will screw things up. Yes, screw things up.
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[...] switched it off. Brendan Cooper who was good enough to show me how to add the widget to my blog has had experienced exactly the same problem. Neither of us has been able to figure out why the application isn’t [...]