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121 lines
10 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 461
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Title: HPR0461: Mibbit
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0461/hpr0461.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:05:16
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---
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...
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Hi, my name is Gordon Sinclair, I am known on IRC as Thistleweb. This HBR episode is about
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Mibit, the web browser based IRC jerkline. Actually it's not about Mibit as such, it's about
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why your project should have Mibit on their home site as a support channel or whatever. Mibit is one
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of several IRC clients that can run through a browser. There's plenty more dedicated clients
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across platform or Linux only or Mac only or whatever Windows only written in any kind of language you can
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imagine. But where Mibit stands alone or not stands alone is not probably not the right description.
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Where it's an advantage is if you have it as just a link on your homepage then visitors who have no
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idea what IRC is can get instant help. They can click on that link on the website and it opens up in
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their browser. They don't need to have any clue what IRC is, they don't need to have an IRC client
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installed. All they do is click on the link, choose their name, their nick and come in and they can
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talk. This breaks down a lot of barriers. It gets people who are potentially interested. They've
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maybe installed your project and they're having some problems and they can't find any solutions on your
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wiki or on your FAQs or whatever and they need some. Just that instant help to say that look at
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guys it's installed this it's conflicting with such and such what can what can I do or the ability to
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get instant connection with people or instant conversation with people can make an awful lot of
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difference. It can give a positive impression that there's the projects actually alive that there
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are people, other human beings around the world there and then who are also enthused enough about
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that project to be able to help out and get involved. So it cuts down the barriers. You don't need to
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know about IRC, you don't need to have an IRC client installed to join in. It can also you can
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connect with any web browser as well which is a big thing from two different ends. You've got a lot
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of people who either need your help and you're for your channel or the people who are actually
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volunteers are there to help out. They are often in work or college or uni, school, whatever
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and they are restricted by the computer that they're sitting at. When they're sitting maybe it
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works maybe sitting on a windows machine and you know the user learnings at home that they're sitting
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on a windows machine at work and in that windows machine they are restricted to what the admins of
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their school or the uni or whatever it is have set up for those windows machines. So you can't
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install anything so you have no chance of installing your own IRC client. You can't maybe SSH out
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and the only option you've got of getting an IRC channel is a browser-based client who
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essentially go to a website and click on a link and it's getting you in from there. You may not
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even be allowed to install proper web browser, you might be stuck in it on the explorer
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which I mean that cuts down the opportunity for something like Chatzilla. So at least anything
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that's actually inside the web browser is an advantage here as well. It's basically a bigger
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chance of letting people who want to come in or able to come in from whatever computer that
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happened to be sitting at. So that's a big thing. The other side of that is it's also, Mibbit also
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has a real-time language translation. I'll say that again just in case that the importance of
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that skip past year. Mibbit has a real-time language translation. This is awesome. This if the
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for another reason this is the reason why this is the new or new in fact there's a top five
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reasons why you should have Mibbit installed on your website for your users to use.
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Now real language is something that native English speakers often take for granted because
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the entire internet unless you go specifically looking for a French version of a site or a German
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version or a Ukrainian version of a Portuguese version, you know a Hebrew version or Arabic or
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Cantonese or whatever. Then generally by default what you're going to find is English is the
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default. And that's great. If you speak English that's great. You don't even notice that.
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Occasionally you go to sites and it's in Dutch or German or whatever and that kind of throws you
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for a bit. You've got to try and look for a translator but generally stuffs in English.
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Now that is fine for English speakers but flip that on its head and imagine what that must be like
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for non-English speakers or people who speak English as a second language or a third language
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and they often speak it a lot better than native English speakers. I always have to tip my heart
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to these people. I would love to have that ability. Well what you can have is that I mean there's
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nothing more frustrating. If you're trying to sit on IRC channel and help people and I've been
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doing that recently with the Linux Mint project. I've been in the IRC channel trying to help people
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out wherever I can. And some projects are bigger than others. They have their own communities.
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I believe Ubuntu has the Spanish community. Spanish speaking community like a German speaking
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community and a Portuguese speaking community. And these are all sort of big enough that works.
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But if you've got a small project and you're limited to initially to the people that are coming
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in and most of them all speak the wrong language. Well what this does is breaks the language barrier
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down. It just completely evaporates it. It's not a perfect translation but because it's a computer
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transfer but it's a lot, it's very, very good. I have to say it's very good.
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What you can do is go in through the Mibit client on the website and select your language so that
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when you speak you type in whatever language is native to you. And then automatically translate
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what you speak, what you type into the language that you select. And the other part of that
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equation is always show other people in your native language and make it singlish.
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So if I'm trying to help someone who only speaks say Spanish, I can use Mibit. And as long as
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I know Spanish, if I can recognize that it's Spanish without understanding what it says,
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that's fine, I'm working select on Spanish and I can start helping this person. Sometimes you have
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to ask, is that Ukrainian or Russian or Ukrainian but that's fine, that's all I need to know. I'll
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switch on Ukrainian and we can chat. So this is an amazing feature. It basically means that you can
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help your volunteers, your community can welcome and help and encourage people from all over the
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planet regardless of their native language, regardless of their ability to comprehend
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in the language that your project is primarily based around. There are obviously longer
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winded versions of doing this from copying a comment and pasting it in a translator and
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picking your translation and copying the translation back across. And that's a bit of us about
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all kind of long-winded. The real-time language translation in Mibit is awesome. It cannot
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recommend it enough. So as I say, for that one reason alone is there's nothing else,
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for that one feature alone you really should have a Mibit widget on your project's website.
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If the real-time translation feature is not enough then what, but I love a god, what's wrong with
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you? No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. If that's not enough, another handy feature that's right there
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is paste bin. Mibit has a paste bin button on it, which is really handy. If you're trying to
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diagnose, as again, I'm coming from the point of view of trying to help out on a channel, to try
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to give some support to users on a channel. And obviously the flip side of that is someone coming in
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looking for support. So if I'm asking someone, they're coming in saying, such and such,
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isn't working. How can I get my concie, for example, to do such and such? Well, a lot of these
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things you can actually ask the person to type in a command, to get some result, and then paste
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the results of that command into paste bin, and then give it a link to the paste bin output so
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that we can all hang over there and look at that log file, that configuration file, whatever
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happens to be, and try to diagnose the problem. So that paste bin is there, right on the bottom,
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basically, which is significantly easier than having them open up a new tab and their browser and
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go to paste bin and copy it. And it's just, I mean, it's easy enough, it just takes that hassle
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out of it. So paste bin is already there. And then I mentioned it does real-time language translation.
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I'm really trying not to go on too much about that. I just think that that's an astoundingly good
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feature, that it's worth mentioning again, again, again, until it sinks in. So with all of these,
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the Mubit client is essentially, it's just a one-time setup, and go to Mubit.com,
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and you can, they've got instructions there on how to set up, to get set up and get the code,
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to embed a Mubit widget on your project's homepage. Now, the thing, one of the
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things with Mubit, that I've seen Ben mentioned, is apparently three nodes are now blocking Mubit,
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they have been for a little while now. I have no idea why. This sounds like an Apple type move,
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because three nodes have their own web-based client, which by all accounts is not very good.
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But I've seen people who are at work in the command, and they'll be mourning the three node of
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blocked Mubit, and the three node client is pretty terrible on Mubit. But that's, if you use three
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node as your support IRCE server, that's where your channels are. Mubit may not work, or it may need
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some additional work to get work in, I don't know, that's something you would have to look into.
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But even if you can't put Mubit on as an option, it's worth having some way on the website,
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some embedded client, even if it is three node. But as I say, the language, real-time language translation
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of Mubit is, for me, it's reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. That's why you should use it. You should have it
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on your site, it gives people. But it closes the barrier. I should say it breaks down the
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down-language barrier, which in the age of the internet is all good. So before I start rambling
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more than I think I have, I'm going to end it there, and just one final time, just so that it
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sinks in, real-time language translation. So go get a Mubit client, set it up, it's a one-shot
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deal. You only do once you put it on the website, you forget about it, and it just owns so many
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doors for people to your project to help spread the word. So I'm Gordon Sinclair, I am on the
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IRC as ThistleWeb. My blog, if you're interested, is ThistleWeb.co.uk. If you want to contact me,
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it's ThistleWebcast at googlemail.com. Until next time.
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