Announcing ChatBubble!
I’ve finally made it easy to post good-looking iChat transcripts to the blog! We use CSS to style DIVs to look like iChat speech balloons.
Cool! Where I can get the CSS?
All the code is checked into SourceForge. You can browse it here.
But how does it work?
A brief description is here. Scott Schiller came up with the Even More Rounded Corners technique that we use. There is a CSS file to include and a python script that turns transcripts into html that you can paste into a blog post. We need more documentation, CSS cleanup, cross-bowswer support, and more speech balloon colors, if you feel like contributing patches.
Doesn’t WordPress completely bork the formatting in Safari by adding unmatched </p> tags?
Yup! WordPress is crap! You can use the wp-unformatted plugin to disable autop() on posts that contain ChatBubbles.
Filed under: code code |
Tagged: ChatBubble , css , iChat , opensource , python

Thanks for putting this together. I’ve been looking for an easy way to display ichat logs inside of blog entries. I think this will do nicely if I can get it working.
I’m having trouble understanding the example syntax — do you run it against a log file or against a bunch of message text entered as an arg?
Hi Dave,
You can run the formatter tool by passing message text as CLI args:
I'll make a web front end soon, but first I have to make it work on IE7. Apparently the bubbles don't work on IE, and I only have Mac and Linux machines right now, so I won't be able to figure out what's wrong until I borrow a windows machine.
Chatbubble Experiment: Sammy Stephens Explains It All...
it’s just like
it’s just like
it’s just like
a mini
mall.
[See this YouTube clip if this doesn’t ring a bell]
The above is...