Over the past week I've been doing what I enjoy doing; identifying (or inventing) a problem and then finding a solution.

The chat applet that is donated for our use by Velveteen Mind is great for being available on multiple profiles, but for me, it was too small. This was the 'problem' I set out to solve.

After investigating a few software packages, I came across gtchat, which seemed to offer the majority of normal chat room functions in a small package. Unlike a lot of the free chat rooms, this was a package that had to be hosted, but had the advantage of no adverts.

After I got it up and running on my test site, Jackal, Nen and Ender helped me with some of the early testing where we discovered some of it's features and fixed a couple of quirks.
Thank you to all who helped test this out.

The site is here http://chat.ijhedges.com/cre8buzz/chat.pl

The site can have multiple rooms with the idea that communities can have their own room where they can chat about their subject.

There is a Photography room that we set up in testing http://chat.ijhedges.com/cre8buzz/chat.pl?id=&language=&css=&proxy=1&template=chat&room=photography
It is possible to post a picture and then discuss it.

There are shortcomings of this room compared to the chat applet, there isn't visibility of what's going on without logging in. I hope that this can supplement the applet.