For years before wordpress became so popular (ie. before wordpress.COM), most of the people I knew had one favourite blogging platform: Blogger (or blogspot as it was known then). There was much to love about blogger, chief among them being the ability to add your own piece of code and edit it however you like (unlike in wordpress.com). With that ability, people started coding the equivalent of wordpress plugins, which were really just chunks of code that you downloaded in a .txt file and copied into the correct portion of your blog site.
One of the most common addons you found on blogspot sites? A shoutbox. For those who don’t know, basically it was an addon in the sidebar which let people submit short messages and have them instantly appear one after another, kind of like having an ongoing chat in the side bar or a mini guestbook of sorts.
Being one of the first few among my friends to move to WordPress, everyone kept asking “Where’s the shoubox?!”, and when I replied “WordPress doesn’t support them”, many people immediately got turned off from it. We were just so accustomed to shoutbox-es.
I know most of you will be saying “Just get a WordPress plugin!” Well, thing is, just a year or two ago, there was no such wordpress plugin for some strange reason. No one ever bothered to code one, I know because I searched high and low for one.
Thankfully, those days are now over and I found this plugin called the WP Wall, which is basically a shoutbox with Facebook lingo in the title. What’s even better is that it’s an AJAX plugin, meaning it has fluid animation and refreshes on the fly. It doesn’t look as flashy as the good old blogspot ones, which has its pros and cons, but I’ll take its simplistic style.
Heck, I’m just glad I’ve got a shoutbox again.
