Any website who offers services needs to have some method for their users to reach them.  Users may have questions, concerns, or may need support regarding your service.  Email and ticket support is always nice, however having the feeling that someone is directly focusing their attention to you is nice.  With this week’s Script of the Week, we are highlighting a live chat/support script.  We recommend this script to anyone looking to offer a live connection between your staff and your users.

This script offers some of the best features from the paid and commercial scripts at the cost of nothing.  How can you say no to an offer as great as this.  The script is open source which means you may edit it to your own needs at your heart’s desire.  Although Prosoft Studio does not use this script, we know may people who have.  From all the feedback we have heard, this script is nothing but amazing.

Here is a brief description from the official website:

LiveZilla, the Next Generation Live Help / Live Support System connects you to your website visitors. Use LiveZilla to provide Live Chats and monitor your website visitors in real-time. Convert visitors to customers - with LiveZilla!

Homepage: http://www.livezilla.net/
Full Features List: http://www.livezilla.net/livehelp/
Download: http://www.livezilla.net/downloads/

What Is CSS?

CSS (cascading stylesheets) is a simple mechanism for controlling the style of a Web document without compromising its structure. By separating visual design elements (fonts, colors, margins, and so on) from the structural logic of a Web page, CSS give Web designers the control they crave without sacrificing the integrity of the data - thus maintaining its usability in multiple environments. In addition, defining typographic design and page layout from within a single, distinct block of code - without having to resort to image maps, <font> tags, tables, and spacer GIFs - allows for faster downloads, streamlined site maintenance, and instantaneous global control of design attributes across multiple pages.

Client-side support for the various CSS properties is uneven, even among browsers that support stylesheets. The CSS properties and values presented here are those supported by both Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4 and higher.

How CSS Works

CSS overrides the browser’s default settings for interpreting how tags should be displayed, letting you use any HTML element indicated by an opening and closing tag (including the <p> tag) to apply style attributes defined either locally or in a stylesheet.

Stylesheets contain rules, composed of selectors and declarations that define how styles will be applied. The selector (a redefined HTML element, class name, or ID name) is the link between the HTML document and the style. There are two different kinds of selectors: types (HTML element tags) and attributes (such as class and ID names).

A CSS declaration has two parts, a property (ie. color) and a value (ie. red).

The basic syntax of a rule:

selector {
property 1: value 1;
property 2: value 2;
}

An example (containing two declarations, as above):

p {
font-size: 12px;
color: red;
}

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PHPSysInfo is valuable script to all web hosting companies.  This script is open source which means it will not even cost you a penny. What this script does is provide statistics and the current status of the server you are hosted on. It can display information such as, how many processors you have, how much Physical Memory (RAM) you have, how much of the hard drive is being used for each partition, and so much more. It also shows devices connected to your server and the current uptime of your server.

Prosoft Studio has used this script in the past and it was very helpful to us and our clients.  Although we do not use this script anymore, we highly recommend that everyone has at least something similar to it.

Here is the official description for the project page:

PHPSysInfo is a customizable PHP Script that parses /proc, and formats information nicely. It will display information about system facts like Uptime, CPU, Memory, PCI devices, SCSI devices, IDE devices, Network adapters, Disk usage, and more.

Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpsysinfo/
Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=15