Chris Hardie

This page is a memorial for the Live-Richmond.com website, which existed from August 2007 to August 2010.

The site, along with its corresponding IRC channel on Freenode, was a chat room created to facilitate online discussion for residents and neighbors of Richmond, Indiana. One the site itself, you could enter the IRC chat room using a Java client, or you could view instructions for how to enter the room using your own standalone IRC client. If enough people were actively chatting in the room, the site would also display recent statements made in the room.

The site only saw activity a few times in its entire existence. Perhaps its peak moment was just a month or so after its launch, when 30-50 people were chatting at once to exchange information about the Primex Plastics fire in September 2007. There were apparently emergency personnel logged into the chat room from the scene, and I relayed into the room other reports I was receiving from observers near the scene. A large black cloud of smoke rose over the city and many streets were closed for blocks around, so people were understandably hungry for realtime information.

Although the site and its chat room were never widely promoted and never really took hold at all, a few other resources have emerged since that made it especially clear that Live-Richmond.com was no longer useful or relevant. These include the maturation of Facebook's online chat as well as the prevalance of smart phones with various instant messaging clients, but the most notable one is the live chat room hosted by the Palladium-Item website, which they make available for notable events and for the interviews that they conduct as a part of their reporting. For most residents of Richmond, when there's something worth talking about, the local newspaper still dominates the online conversation space for now.

On the technical side, the Live-Richmond.com site made use of the PJIRC java IRC client to provide web access to the IRC channel, the Eggdrop IRC bot to create a connection between the webserver and the IRC channel, and a custom Perl script I wrote to parse the eggdrop recent activity log and display relevant bits on the website itself.

If you have questions about the Live-Richmond.com site, please contact me.