You're on the right track! The last missing piece of puzzle is getting initial colonists (by recruiting) from an already occupied planet.
We're writing a manual (a player volunteered to help us),
http://www.satoshigalaxy.xyz/help/manual#colonization but it's not too useful in it's current state.
So you have to recruit colonists from another inhabited planet (wait, is occupied == inhabited?) and bring them to the target planet to colonize the target planet? I'm pretty confused about the mechanism here.
Why is the manual accessible from the UI? Incomplete as it is, it's still helpful for people trying to figure out the game.
Nor should you see anything like that again! In today's update, we've finally AJAX'ified the chat.
Sweet. I wish you could make the buttons (in general) more distinguishable from the background though.
p/s: I swear for a moment there I saw Mitchell's post asking about web sockets.