Tonight, as you probably know, is the opening of Knitting Chatters,what I hope will become our regular, Thursday evening, virtual SnB.
You will get there by clicking on that button in the sidebar - right under the Dulaan button - the one that says “Knitting Chatters” (doh!). Right now the sub-heading indicates that the chat-room isn’t available. But tonight, when things are opened up, it will show how many people are in the room - we may even achieve double digits! Heheh…
Okay, you’ve clicked on the button and you’re looking at this:
So now what do you do? You have a couple of options. All you have to do right now, is fill in the Username field with your first name or whatever nickname you’d like to use on-line. Ignore the Password field and just click on Login That will take you right to the chat room.
You can, also register by clicking on the [Register] and if you decide to try that, you’ll see this:
Fill in Username
Fill in Password - with whatever you like or will remember :)
Confirm your Password
Fill in your e-mail address.
Click the Register button
That will bring you to a page that thanks you for registering and tells you to “Click here” to login. On my monitor, those words are not bolded or italicized or in a different color from the rest of the text on the screen so there’s no immediately apparent way to see that it’s a link - but it is. Click on the words Click here and you will then go right into the chat room.
For future logins, just fill in your username and your password and click Login
Registering, while not at all necessary, does give you a couple of advantages. Your username goes into the database which means it’s registered to you and no one else can use it. If your username is Penelope and you decide to register, you’ll be the only one who can use that name. The next Penelope would have to change it slightly and use, say, Penelope2 instead.
Registering also enables you to fill in biographic information, should you so desire and add a picture of yourself (or an avatar) - no more than 100 x 100 pixels, please :) Your email address is simply so your password can be sent to you should you forget what it is. No one will ever have access to it.
Okay, now we’re in the main chat room:
At the top, under the banner, you’ll see this:
From left to right, they are:
UserCP - User control panel. You can click this to change various parameters to suit yourself. You don’t have to change anything, of course, but if you want to, you can :)
Status This indicates your status: Away, Available, Be right back, Be back later. These are more appropriate to a chat room that’s open 24/7 rather than something like this that’s only around for a few hours, one night a week. But you can certainly use them if you wish. Your default status will always be “Available”.
Help This will open another browser window with the help manual for the chat software. Self explanatory.
Logout This logs you out of the chat room. You should always click this before you leave for the night.
Then there’s the main action :)
That big window is where all the chat takes place. Your username and the time will always precede any statement you send to the chat window.
Below the window are more buttons. They will allow you to change the parameters of your text. Again, from left to right:
Font You can click this button to change the font on your screen. It will only change what you type.
Font size This will change the size of what you type. 10 pt is the default, but you can change it to 12 pt or 14 pt if you’d like it to be larger.
Color This will change the color of your text, if you’d like to do that. Black is the default, but you can change it to anything you want. Don’t set the color too light though or you’ll have trouble seeing it in the window :)
The next three buttons you’ve probably seen before. B - bold, I - Italics and U - Underline. If you’d like to bold, italicize or underline your words, click the appropriate button.
Smileys Clicking this button will open a small window with a selections of smileys in it. Click on the one you’d like to use :)
Finally, at the bottom, is the text window. Simply click inside of it and type whatever you want to say. Hit the enter button to send your words to the chat window - or click the Send button.
And that’s really all there is to this. Please don’t hesitate to comment or write with any questions you might have. I have tested this on Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox and Opera browsers. Opera had a bit of an issue, but I’m not using a terribly current copy and that’s probably all it was. IE and Firefox had no problems at all.
See you tonight!
No trackbacks yet.
Wheeeee! That was FUN!!
Aarlene - It sure was, wasn’t it? Gonna have to do this again - maybe next week? Heheh…
That was a blast! Hope to get on a wee bit earlier next time :-)
Kathy - It was huge fun! Please come again - it was great to talk with you!
