My Amy Chat Website wass a small (it took just over a day to get it working satisfactorily) site devoted to use by my wife and her friends whilst she's was on maternity leave, back in 2009.

The site was born out of necessity due to the fact that we didn't have a computer at home whilst I was at work and the only way she could get onto the web was through the Internet Channel on our Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, whilst most sites worked well enough, Facebook, ran like a lame dog (a one legged lame dog in fact) More importantly, at the time Facebook's chat facility was simply unusable as there is no way to send a message even though you could type one. Amy's Chat Website is a small, lightweight and immediately accessible.

The site is built using a combination of PHP and AJAX and retrieves the chat log from a MySQL database.

Developer Blog

8th April 2009

In all honesty, at the time of writing (22:57pm) the site is practically complete. The only features I want to add are:

• A security feature which strips potentially harmful HTML code from comments.
• A few more graphical smilies

Outside of those features I don't want to focus too much on this site. I'll probably stick a picture of the site up when it goes live on my work server tomorrow.

9th April 2009

The site went live at 12:00pm today on my work server and seemed to be a resounding success. I have decided to add a couple more features to the site:

• A list of people who are currently active.
• A toolbox box showing graphical icons that can be added to comments by clicking on them.

In order to perform the first task, I'm going to have to ensure each user has a unique user name and add an additional table which monitors when the web session last requested a list of messages. A user's session will be determined as timed out (logged off) if a request is not sent within 10 seconds of the previous request. The server can then send back a list of active users for display.

The smilies box will be fairly simple to implement. As promised, here's an image of the site in its current state:

10th April 2009

Seeing as both Amy and I have had an awful nights sleep, I decided to start early today. Progress has been good - I've got the smily/icon box and insert code done and I've also successfully implemented the active user list.

Apart from stripping unwanted HTML tags from comments, I'd say my work is almost done. You can see another image of Amy Chat running on my development machine as the work server seems to have gone down this morning - co-incidence or fate?

Update: I've now finished the code for stripping HTML tags too!

If you can have questions or want to report a bug with this project, please contact me using this email link

7th August 2012

Really? I hear you say. An update to a project that's over three years old? Well, not really so much an update, rather than a re-build of the database and a direct link to my server so you can try it out for yourselves! Don't forget this was a very small and simple project so don't expect miracles and please don't abuse it either!