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Use Google Wave to Blog

I have been thinking about this idea ever since I started playing with Google Wave. How about creating a blog post by embedding Waves – one for the post and the other for comments. The former Wave will be editable only by me, while the latter will be editable by anyone (with a Google Wave account).

This became possible, recently, with the introduction of the read-only access feature. I created a blog post with a Wave talking about the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Google Wave and a blank (to start with) Wave for comments. Click here to see this blog post. This was achieved as follows:

• Logged into Google Wave and created a new Wave about Frequently Asked Questions about Google Wave, as showed in the screenshot.
  

  A Wave about frequently asked questions about Google Wave

• Added the Public participant to this Wave. This can be done as follows:
  • Click on the + button on the bottom right pane titled Contacts to add a new contact
  • For Address type in public@a.gwave.com
  • Add this new contact by clicking on the Submit button.
  • Next add this contact to the Wave, which you want to make public. For this click on the + button on the top of the Wave.
  • On the Add Participants pop-up, search/browse, and click to add the contact named Public.
  • You will see a notification on the top of the Wave saying “You gave everyone access”.
• I gave Read-Only access to the Public contact/participant. Refer to this blog post on how to assign read-only access.
• Next I created another Wave, for comments, with just one blip or message which says: Wave your comments about the FAQs on Google Wave.
• Added the Public contact to this Wave but did not setup read-only access this time. That means, anyone (with a Google Wave account) can add/edit/delete blips/messages on this Wave. That’s what commenting is all about, right?
• To embed Google Waves in this blog post, I installed and activated the Wavr plugin for WordPress. You can download this plugin from here
• With Wavr plugin you can embed any Google Wave in a blog post using the following syntax:[ wave id = "<Google-Wave-ID> ]
  Please note that, unlike shown above, there should be no space between the opening/left square bracket and the text “wave id”.
• To find out the Wave ID of a Google Wave, Click on the Wave. Copy the URL (shown in your web browser) from googlewave.com upto the . (dot) or upto the end. Exclude the dot. Replace %252B with+ (plus). For example, in my case, the Wave IDs for the content and comments Waves are googlewave.com!w+3413MFFlD and googlewave.com!w+53bOqvqzB
• Next I created a new blog post in WordPress and embedded the Waves as follows:
  [ wave id = "googlewave.com!w+3413MFFlD" ]
  [ wave id = "googlewave.com!w+53bOqvqzB" ]
• You can change the default colors of the embedded Waves from the WordPress admin panel – Settings>Wavr. I changed the default background color and default color to #FFFFFF (white) and #000000 (black) respectively. I also set the height to 700px. Note that , you can set these options on a per Wave basis too. You can find more about it, at the Wavr’s download page.
• Last, since I wanted to encourage comments via the Google Wave only, I disabled comments to the blog post. This can be done while writing or editing the post. Click on the Discussions panel (at the bottom of the editor) and untick “Allow Comments”.

The output of the above efforts can be seen here. Be ready to catch me, in real time, when and while I update the FAQ wave. Though it is more likely that I may catch you while you are writing a comment and could reply instantaneously. After all I pledged to keep Google Wave always open in my web browser.

Use Google Wave to Blog, 8.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating
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