New commands for patrons texting your Twilio SMS gateway

We've added two texting commands that give your patrons control over text messages sent from your Twilio number.

When a patron texts "stop", "quit", or "end" to your Twilio number, she will no longer receive any incoming text messages from your librarians. As confirmation, she will receive a notice that the stop command was successful. These words will have no effect if they are simply part of a larger text message. That is, "When will this rain stop?" will go through just fine.

To counteract a previously issued "stop" command, a patron can text "start" to your Twilio number. She will again be able to receive incoming text messages from your librarians. As confirmation, she will receive a notice that the start command was successful.

These commands are in keeping with best practice guidelines from the MMA.

P.S. Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes last Friday! It really made our week! And, if your library wants to be featured in our Wordle, there's still plenty of time to be included.

Guess what? We're four years old today!

Today is LibraryH3lp's birthday! We don't typically spend much time on this blog talking about ourselves, but this feels like a good time to do just that. We also have one favor to ask of you (think of it is a birthday wish), but that can wait until the very end of this post.

Four years ago today, we issued a call for testers and described our basic goals regarding features. A year later, we announced that the system was self-sufficient, in that it was making enough money to cover basic hosting costs, although programming time was mostly still donated by Eric. Eric was still doing a lot of separate contract programming in those days, with LibraryH3lp as an interesting side project.

Four years later, we're still going strong and still growing. At this point, the care and feeding of LibraryH3lp involves full-time work by three people. It is Eric's main project now. Amy Shelton, programmer and support guru extraordinaire, joined up full-time in May 2011. Pam left her full-time librarian job at UNC-Chapel Hill at the end of December, 2011, in order to focus more fully on LibraryH3lp.

Today, over 300 universities and colleges, public libraries, special libraries, and various combinations thereof pay for subscriptions (thank you!). The state-wide NCknows service migrated fully onto LibraryH3lp, including backup staff, in the summer of 2011. We have servers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. System architecture has been revised to support heavy usage and growth capacity.

The code is being continually improved. While the whole system is not open source, we have released parts of the system as 10 different open source projects and contributed to over a dozen more. We plan to talk more about our open source work later.

In October 2011, one of our busiest months, there were 67,958 chats of at least 30 seconds duration on the US server. In the last 24 hours, we processed about 25.5 million presence requests from over 200,000 unique IP addresses; a presence request happens each time someone loads a web page with a LibraryH3lp widget or presence badge. Those numbers (presence requests from unique IPs) are a good indication that people are out there using your library websites very heavily, even on a cold day in January. Also in the last 24 hours, there were about a quarter million messages (individual lines of chat) sent back and forth.

What is the secret to our success? Our loyal customers! We know there are several choices for virtual reference chat out there. So we sincerely appreciate the business of each of our customers. On this fourth birthday, we'd like to thank each of our customers for making LibraryH3lp a success and for trusting us to provide the infrastructure for your library's service.

Now about that one birthday wish. We have never published a list of customers on our website, because that seems like a kind of rude thing to do without permission, even though it's done all the time in the technology field. Instead we have usually referred those who ask to the Library Success Wiki. However, we'd really love to put a Wordle composed of current LibraryH3lp libraries on our web site. People really do ask, and we think it would look nifty.

If you'd like to add your library to our Wordle, please either comment here, tweet us, or shoot us an email at support@libraryh3lp.com.

Thanks, everyone!

Eric, Pam, and Amy

Fancy follow-me widget behavior with some JavaScript

For those of you using follow-me widgets, we'd like to share a nifty trick where you can use an image of a chat widget to initiate the follow-me behavior and then hide the chat widget image while the patron is using the follow-me widget. First, we'll show you the trick in action. Then we'll lift the hood and show how you can do it too!

Our example comes courtesy of Danielle Theiss from Rockhurst University's Greenlease Library and Jessica Hammond from the Mobius Consortium. Many thanks to them for letting us share their work with you! If the video below doesn't show up properly, you can also view it here.





If you'd like to try out their page out for yourself, follow this link to the Mobius search page.

Now, let's lift the hood and see how it works.

The first thing you'll want to do is to wrap the div containing your chat widget image within another div and give that div a distinctive id. Here is an example of what to do assuming you are using the output from our updated widget designer and using an id of "chat-widget".
<div id="chat-widget"> <div class="needs-js"> You need to enable JavaScript in your browser to chat with us. </div> </div>
Then you'll need to add a bit of JavaScript as close to the end of your BODY as possible.
<script type="text/javascript"> var id = 'chat-widget'; try { if (window.parent.location.href === undefined) { document.getElementById(id).style.display = 'none'; } else { document.getElementById(id).style.display = ''; } } catch (err) { document.getElementById(id).style.display = 'none'; } </script>
For those interested in the technical details... The if statement is to handle Chrome. The exception handling takes care of Firefox and IE. Seems to work fine for latest versions of Opera, SeaMonkey, and Camino too. Please let us know if you find a case that isn't handled.

That should do the trick. Have your own tips and tricks for follow-me widgets? Please share them in the comments below. :-)

Updates to Twilio SMS gateway pricing

Beginning February 1, 2012, two things will be happening with regard to Twilio SMS gateway billing.

First, we'll start assessing all existing Twilio numbers a $1/month charge. We've always said that we charge $1/month for Twilio numbers, but actually haven't up until this point. If you acquired a Twilio number prior to February 1, 2012, we will start deducting $1/month for use of that number beginning on February 1. We will be in touch via e-mail with our individual customers this week about their current Twilio SMS balance.

The bigger change to billing only affects numbers acquired on or after February 1, 2012. Any Twilio number acquired on or after February 1, 2012 will be assessed at $2/month. This modest price increase helps cover our administration costs.

The price of incoming or outgoing SMS remains the same at $0.03 per message.

These prices are good for both U.S. and Canada numbers. To date, Twilio has kept prices for Canadian numbers stable and the same as U.S. numbers. Yay!

If you are considering adding a Twilio SMS gateway to your account, please have us acquire your number before February 1, 2012 so that you'll be grandfathered into the $1/month phone charge. To set one up, e-mail us:

• your top-level admin name
• the queue on which you'd like to add the gateway
• the desired area code for the number
• (optional) a number to which to forward any voice calls
• (optional) a custom offline message that is 140 characters or less

If you have a Twilio SMS gateway that you no longer want for whatever reason, please let us know.

New! Custom offline messages for Twilio SMS gateways

Big news! We just updated our Twilio SMS gateway on the main US server to deliver messages sent when your queue is offline. And you can now customize the "we're offline" message a patron receives when texting to an offline queue.

Offline message delivery works like this. When a librarian brings the queue online, the librarian will receive any messages texted to your phone number while the queue was offline. The librarian will also receive system-generated metadata that states how long ago, in hours and minutes, the patron's message was sent. The messages will appear as a regular chat, allowing the librarian to get back in touch with the patron instantly.

Also, by popular request, each Twilio phone number can have its own customized "we're offline" message. Librarians have often wanted to provide their hours or a link to their service hours page, for instance, so the patron will have some idea of when to expect a reply.

If you'd like to customize the "we're offline" message for your Twilio phone number(s), please email your phone number(s) and the exact wording of your offline message to support@libraryh3lp.com.

Staffing queues on-the-go from your favorite mobile device

Did you know that you can chat your LibraryH3lp (and My Customer Cloud) queues on-the-go? In fact, you can staff your queues from any mobile device that supports Jabber/XMPP IM client applications.

When staffing your queues on a mobile device, you'll definitely want to use a 3rd party Jabber/XMPP IM client rather than the webchat client. One drawback of the webchat client on iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) is that the sound notification will not work. But the primary reason to prefer IM clients over webchat on mobile devices is push notifications. Push notifications will ensure that you easily know when there is an incoming chat from a patron, even if your device is locked or you are using another app. For instance, if you are helping someone with research during a chat, you will probably need to switch to a web browser, and with push notifications, you'll get proactively notified when your patron sends you a new message.

There are tons of IM client options out there - IM+, BeeJive, and Process One to name a few. In this post, we'll focus on IM+. There are two primary reasons why we tend to recommend IM+. The first reason is that it has both free and paid versions. The free version has ads and times you out after 2 hours. The pro version has no ads and lets you stay logged in for up to 7 days. The nice thing about having free and paid versions is that you can try out the free version now and later upgrade to the pro if you want to. The second reason is that IM+ is available over a variety of mobile platforms.

Configuring IM+ to chat your LibraryH3lp (or My Customer Cloud) queues:

service = Jabber
login = your_username@libraryh3lp.com
password is your LibraryH3lp password
host = libraryh3lp.com
port = 5223
use old-style SSL = on

For My Customer Cloud users, you'll just replace libraryh3lp everywhere above with mycustomercloud.

As far as IM+ settings go, you'll want to make sure that you have push notifications turned on. That way you'll be notified of incoming chats from patrons. Play around a bit. IM+ has various settings you can customize for push notifications, including sounds, alerts, and badges.

If you have experience with another mobile IM client that you'd like to recommend, please add a comment to this post and share your thoughts with other LibraryH3lp users. :-)

Twilio SMS gateway update - Canadian numbers now available!

We've got fantastic news for Canadian libraries using LibraryH3lp or My Customer Cloud! Twilio just approved us for their Canada SMS Beta service. This means that we are now able to offer Canadian phone numbers as part of our Twilio SMS gateway.

Please be aware that this service through Twilio is still in beta testing. If you'd like to give it a try, please email us and let us know:

• the desired area code/city/province
• the queue on which to install the gateway
• your library's top-level admin name.
• (optional) a number to forward regular voice calls to (usually reference or circulation desk number)

We'll handle all of the setup for you. You do not need to do anything directly with Twilio.

We'll front you a $10 credit so that you can test out the Twilio SMS gateway. If you decide to adopt the Twilio SMS gateway for production use, pricing for Canadian numbers and usage is currently the same as our US phone number pricing. We'll let you know if Twilio determines during the beta that a slightly higher rate is needed to ensure stability for Canadian numbers.

Please do not pay Twilio directly! Use our payments page instead.

Our Twilio SMS gateways feature:

• A phone number for your patrons to text.
• Nearly instant message delivery. No polling interval.
• Automatic notification to the patron when the library is offline.
• Coming soon: Offline messages are delivered the next time your queue comes online.
• Not free, but very affordable. And of course, it integrates into LibraryH3lp like all our other gateways.
• Text messages can be transferred to other librarians, transcripts stored, statistics gathered, etc...