Ben’s posthaven

I ran into this problem with Olark and Turbolinks tonight, and it seems I’m not the only one, so I wrote out how to fix it:

In the current olark configuration code, there’s a script tag, some javascript, then a noscript tag. The javascript is the important part. It starts with “window.olark||”, then a big minified function, and ends with a call to olark.identity.

The window.olark|| is just there to prevent the script from being re-run on the same page, the rest is the initialization. You can extract the initialization function, and give it a name, e.g. init_olark. Then you can rewritethe initialization as:

function init_olark(c) {/*big initialization function*/}           
window.olark||init_olark({/*your initialization hash*/});
olark.identify(/*your identity*/);

You’ll need your identity string to call olark.identity, it’s right there in your js snippet, and you’ll need your initialization hash, which is the argument passed to init_olark, also included in the snippet. My initialization hash should include a loader, name and methods key, so I guess yours should too. Once you’ve done this, all that’s left is to call the init_olark() function with your initialization vars and call olark.identity on every turbolinks page load. With jquery that looks like:

$(document).on('page:load', function(){
  init_olark({
    /*your initialization hash*/
  });
  olark.identify(/*your identity*/);
});

It’s not perfect – there are some js errors in the depths of the olark code, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with the operation of the chat widget or any other JS on the page, so I judge it a success.

Hope that helps!

Note: updated to call "identify"