I'm trying to set up a page where users can perform different actions on a webpage while chatting with me. I need to be able to have a live view of a particular DIV on the user's page that has tabs. When I click a tab, it should update on their screen and when they click a tab, it should reflect on my screen.
Finding a chat script was easy enough, but I'm struggling to locate on Google and Stack Overflow a basic script or code snippets to acheive this. Perhaps I'm not using the correct terms. Could someone please point me in the right direction?
I think what you need is socket.io. It's really easy to use: http://socket.io/#how-to-use
There are many ways to hack this into working, but, if you want a standardized way of doing it, use the Bayeux protocol. Way that this kind of communication is done by gmail, facebook and so on is via an implementation of cometd (cometd.org). There is a lot of reference material for implementing this setup on the net.
By going this route, it's going to be a two part problem: (1) setup the environment to allow for cometd interaction
This could basically be 0 work, provided that your remote host gives you ability to run daemon scripts ex: infinite PHP scripts.
(2) write the code that will sync clients with server. This will be the low end part where you read the div, and make broadcast-level communication to all clients about it.
A good fully operational example is this How to implement COMET with PHP article.