The Geekorium

In honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I’d try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn’t the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray - the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it’s not me!

I’ve got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I’ll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I’ll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you’re already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I’ll add you directly.

[ This used to be an embedded view of a Wave. Technology comes and goes and we lose even the archives of what we had. ]
Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn’t jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.

Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: “Things to do in Adelaide”, a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It’s shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we’re on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we’re accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it’s now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can’t recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It’s fast, good looking, and very useful.

Use this plugin to embed a wave into a wordpress post, as easy as [wave id=”wave-id”].

Wavr [WordPress Plugins]

jWave is a jQuery plug-in that you can use to easily embed a Google Wave into your website with the grace and simplicity of jQuery.

jQuery Plugins

This jQuery plugin was one of the first community made additions on the Google Wave API page.

You’ve reached a page that contains content from Google Wave. We’re currently in a developer preview with a limited number of users. If you have an account please log in at wavesandbox.com.

Embedding my first Google Wave into Wordpress!

The problem with embedding waves in blogs - no one can read them if the service goes down or won’t allow you access. Better would be to have the wave actually publish content to your database. Then a Wordpress plugin that takes comments written and puts them back into your wave stream would be necessary. Better would be blog software written on the Wave Protocol.

The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you’re able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you’re able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.

Introducing the Google Wave APIs

Just testing pdfmenot.com - a tool from the people behind bugmenot.com, retailmenot.com and cushycms.com. It lets you read a PDF in your browser without downloading it, and even embed a pdf in another page with a bit of javascript. Also trying out an alternative, vuzit.com.

I’m partial to the simplicity of pdfmenot - just add a prefix of “http://pdfmenot.com/view/” to a PDF to view it. And the embedding is a tiny bit of javascript. Vuzit on the other hand requires an API key to be embedded in the iframe. Vuzit does pick up the right zoom level automatically, which is a plus - and with a bit of work could be set up with my own logo/branding. PDFmenot seems to be one size fits all.

PDFmenot seems aimed more at the user - making PDF viewing simple for anyone who doesn’t want to download a PDF to view it. Vuzit seems more geared to the developer with a HUGE javascript API that can handle all sorts of fine control, making embedding documents very powerful. I’d use vuzit in a large CMS, pdfmenot for simple sites (like mine). ¹