A blog post using Google Wave for content and comments

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.

I fired Android Market on my phone, searched for “wordpress” and the official app was right at the top, proudly named as WordPress, just WordPress. Yea, that’s indeed the official app!After installation, I launched the app. It prompted me for Blog URL, for which I supplied http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com. For the username and password, I typed in the admin’s username and password, since I blog using the admin account. Subsequently, it allows me to manage comments, the blog posts and the pages on my blog. After playing with it for a couple of hours, I noticed the following pros and cons in the WordPress app for Android:

Pros:

• New comment(s) notification on the phone’s notification bar. You can set the app to check for comments every 5 mins to every 24 hours.
• Ability to reply to comments
• Comments moderation – approve, unapprove, mark spam
• Nice tabbed interface with readable font. Big, touch friendly buttons
• Ability to add images to the blog post from the phone’s gallery
• Ability to compose a blog post on the phone, set it’s status to publish but publish it later on the blog site via “Upload Draft to Blog”.  Useful feature, when at times, we don’t have an active data connection on the phone.
• Categories, once downloaded from the blog, are cached.
• Ability to manage more than one WordPress based blogs.

Cons

• No audio alert with the new comment alert
• Limited editor options - bold, underline, italics, link and blockquote
• The editor is not a rich text editor – the HTML tags show in the post’s text, which looks messy
• Limited options to place the images – either at the top or at the bottom of a post
• No option to delete a post once it is published, if by mistake
• No option to insert a “read more” tag

I found the WordPress app limiting when it comes to composing a blog post. This is because I like to use HTML lists (<ul>, <ol> and <li>) and I like to place images in between the post’s text. I may use the comment features – notification, moderation and reply. Someday, with upgrades and more features, the WordPress app may make it to my list of must-have Android apps.

Here is how it started. My initial wishlist from this integration was as follows:

1. Whenever I write a new blog post, it should be automatically posted (or tweeted) to Twitter
2. My tweets should get posted on my Blog

Referring to the second point, I did not want a blog post each, for every tweet. Instead I wanted a single blog post with all my tweets – say, for the day.

The plugin which served my above mentioned requirements is Alex King’s Twitter Tools which can be downloaded from here. After installing the plugin, I created a category in WordPress called Tweets.  Next, I configured the plugin (Settings>Twitter Tools) as shown in the screenshot below (click on the image to view the settings clearly):

Twitter Tools Settings

Note that I have set “Create a blog post from each of your tweets?” to No, but have set the option “Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets?”. Also I selected the Tweets category for “Category for tweet posts:”. With this, all my tweets will be automatically posted on my blog, under the Tweets category, at 23:59 hrs, every day.

I also opted to use the Twitter Tools widget to display the latest Tweets on my Blog’s sidebar. Depending on whether your WordPress theme is widget enabled, you can setup the Twitter Tools widget via Appearances>Widgets – just the standard WordPress way to display widgets. If you scroll down on my blog’s home page, you can spot this widget, titled “WHAT I’M DOING”.

As a Result
With Twitter Tools, the following is achieved:

• Whenever I write a new blog post, it gets automatically posted on Twitter as “New blog post: <blog-post-title> <tiny-url>”.
• All my tweets get posted on my blog at the end of each day, under the Tweets category, as “Twitter Updates for <date>”.  These tweets are searchable using the search on the blog.
• Hence my knowledge base = blog posts + tweets are now in one place.
• Google should (more on this below) index the tweets against my blog and lead more traffic to my blog.

But Some Issues
The popular Twitter Tools serves well but not perfect and hence the following issues:

• The blog posts corresponding to the tweets may not be properly indexed by Google due to lack of meta tags. The only meta tags that Twitter Tools would record against the daily digest of tweets are “twitter, shekharg and tweets”, in my case (see the Twitter Tools setting above). Editing each Twitter update post and adding tags is mundane.
• I tweet more frequently than writing blog posts. Hence my blog’s home page gets cluttered with Twitter updates. Also, people subscribed to my blog’s RSS feed will start getting more of tweets and less of blog posts – kinda redundant because many of them are following me on Twitter, as well.

I solved the above two issues with a WordPress plugin for each – namely WP Calais Archive Tagger and Ultimate Category Excluder respectively.

Automatic tagging with WP Calais Archive Tagger
This plugin uses the Opencalaisservice to analyze, semantically, the text of the blog post and automatically generates the relevant tags for each post. After installing this plugin, all I had to do is to supply it with a Opencalais API key, which I already had. You can get a API key  by registering, for free, at http://www.opencalais.com/user/register. Once registered, the key will be emailed to you. Type in that key in “Plugins>Calais Archive Tagger” page on the WordPress admin panel.

Subsequently, clicking on the link “Click here to start tagging your posts” automatically start tagging all the posts including the daily twitter updates. Note that it maintains the tags that were entered manually against the blog posts and adds onto them. As you may have guessed, each time you want the Calais Archive Tagger to generate meta tags, you will have to come to this page and click on the link. I do it once in a day or two. Someone has also written a  Cron friendly script to make this happen automatically. I’m not using it, yet.

Note that I have been using All in One SEO Packplugin which displays the past tags as meta tags, on the blog pages, for search engines. Without this plugin, the automatically generated tags may not help in the search engine context. This plugin is highly recommended whether or not you are integrating with Twitter.

Exclude Tweets from Home Page and RSS with Ultimate Category Excluder
This is a nifty and easy to use plugin. Following are the screenshots of how my blog’s home page displays without and with this plugin:

Blog Home Page without the Ultimate Category Excluder Plugin

Blog Home Page with the Ultimate Category Excluder Plugin

Note that with the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin, none of the “Twitter Updates” posts are showing on the home page. A visitor can still access these posts via archives, category (on the sidebar) or using the search. All I had to do, after installing the plugin, is to exclude the Tweets category in the plugin’s settings (Settings>Category Exclusion) as shown in the screenshot below:

Settings for Ultimate Category Excluder Plugin

Note that I have opted to exclude the Tweets category from the home page and from the feeds. I left it to appear in the Archives. Bottom line: integrating WordPress perfectly with Twitter requires more than just the Twitter Tools

Update (November 15, 2009): All of a sudden, after October 28, Twitter Tools stopped posting the daily digests of tweets onto this Blog. Similar/same issue is posted hereby others. Blaming WordPress upgrade to 2.8.5 and my server operating system upgrade to CentOS 5.4 did not make sense because these happened before this issue occurred. That is, the daily digests did work, for a few days, after the upgrades.

I kept trying miscellaneous ideas like downgrading to Twitter Tools 1.6, deactivating/deleting the plugin and re-installing the upgrade to WordPress 2.8.5, but nothing worked. Finally what worked for me is as follows:

• Deactivate and delete the Twitter Tools plugin
• WARNING: Take a backup of the database before proceeding further
• Delete all the Twitter Tools related options from the database table called wp_options.  Following is the MySQL query which can be fired using any MySQL database client say phpMyAdmin:

  delete from wp_options where option_name like 'aktt%';

  
  

• Reinstall the Twitter Tools plugin. I downloaded and unzipped the plugin into the plugins directory instead of installing it from the WordPress admin panel (via Plugins.Add New)
• If logged in, log out from the admin panel
• Re-activate the Twitter Tools plugin.
• Ensure that all the configuration under Settings>Twitter Tools are blanked out. If yes, re-enter the settings like your Twitter Username and password, daily digest frequency etc.

Henceforth you should start receiving the digests. I applied this fix on 10th November and it is working for me, for far, even after an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6.

Update (December 23, 2009): Updated my blog to WordPress 2.9 on December 18th. Twitter Tools working so far without any issues.

Update (February 4, 2010): Updated Twitter Tools to version 2.1.2 on January 25th. Waited for this long to update this post because I wanted to ensure that the daily digests of tweets are posted, regularly, as before. It seems to be working! Expect that on January 30th, the digest got posted thrice. Besides this one of case, Twitter Tools 2.1.2 is behaving. Also after upgrading to Twitter Tools 2.1.2, Open Web Analytics dashboard started working. Earlier I had to deactivate Twitter  Tools temporarily to look at the Analytics dashboard.

Update (May 28, 2010): Again, Twitter Tools stopped posting daily digests – as explained in Update (November 15, 2009) above – from 8th May to 15th May. This time I noticed that my server’s (on which this blog is hosted) system time has gone out of sync. Note that this wasn’t the issue during the earlier occurrences of this problem. Nevertheless, Twitter Tools should have worked as per the wrong server time. I even upgraded to Twitter Tools 2.3.1 hoping that the issue will self heal. Waited for a week, for it to work (or call me lazy ). Finally what resurrected the daily digests is the same solution that I posted above – refer to Update (November 15, 2009). Since 16th May to till date (May 28) the daily tweets are being posted regularly.

Update (October 4, 2010): The latest version of Twitter Tools uses OAuth for authentication. This worked fine for me on WordPress 2.9.2. When I upgraded to 3.0.1, Twitter Tools stopped working. Note that the version of Twitter Tools  I’m using is 2.4.  Next, I followed the same steps as mentioned in Update (November 15, 2009). But this time, I faced a different issue. The authentication (the first step before setting up the plugin) kept failing saying “Authentication Failed. Please check your credentials and make sure Twitter is up and running”. After hours of troubleshooting at the code level, coincidently I happened to check my server’s time (system time). It was lagging behind by several minutes. Updated my server’s time (via ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com) and voila! the authentication worked. Yet to see if the daily digests will start shooting up again. Will keep this space updated.

Update (October 9, 2010): With reference to Update (October 4, 2010), daily digests seem to be fixed. From October 4 to till date, daily digests are being posted regularly by Twitter Tools

So what is Yahoo Buzz ? It is similar to Digg. More the Buzzes on a story (a web article or blog post), more is the story popular. The first buzz (clicking on the Yahoo Buzz icon) on a web page adds that web page to the Yahoo Buzz’s list. Subsequent, buzzes increases its popularity ranking.

But Yahoo Buzz had been there for while, then what’s the big buzz about it now ? Earlier Yahoo Buzz was accepting buzzes (i.e. accepting URLs) only for selected (by Yahoo) websites. Now it is open to any website, including this Blog

When you click on one of my blog posts to view the full  post, you will find an icon “Share/Save” (at the bottom of the post, but before the comments). By clicking on that icon you can add my blog posts to Digg, Delicious, Google Bookmarks etc.

This icon shows up on my Blog posts because I’m using a WordPress plugin called Add to Any. This plugin uses the Add to Any service which allows a Web article (like a Blog post) to be added/submitted to various social bookmarking sites. The cool about this plugin is the list of social bookmarking sites are updated very frequently and this list automatically updates on my Blog – without requiring any change in the plugin code and without the need to update the plugin. The Yahoo Buzz was opened to all web sites on 18th, “Add to Any” incorprated it on 19th and I noticed it yesterday (on 20th).

Happy Buzzing

Following were the depicted (graphically) scores for the home page (http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com) of this Blog (click to see the full graph):

• The score was 2.45 out of 5
• 2.45 was rounded off to “3″ as “Overall” score by Ready.mobi
• Just for information: www.google.com scored 5/5!
• Just for information: www.yahoo.com scored 4/5

I’m happy with:

1. The reported download size of the homepage (4.8k)
2. The reported download speed on an Edge connection (about 1.2 seconds)

Note:

1. Ready.mobi works with WordPress plugins (and should work with other such plugins) which detect a mobile device (or mobile browser) and redirect it to the mobile friendly version/site.
2. If you are using caching, then you may first like to hit (or browse) the Website page. This will build the cache, in case the page is not visited for a while. And then perform the Ready.mobi test. The speed at which the page loads contributes to the overall score.
3. To checkout your Website on the mobile emulators (on the Page Results) you will need Sun Java Plugin
4. Mobile website developers or webmasters should check out http://dev.mobi/content/dotmobi-mobile-web-developers-guide.
5. You may have noticed on the home page of Ready.mobi, it also offers entire site check (instead of checking page by page). The site check requires registration. Havn’t checked this out yet.

I’m not happy with the overall score (despite, specifically, using a Mobile Plugin for this Blog). If you scroll down the Ready.mobi’s “Page results” page, it will tell you the tests which have failed. I found the following tests failing for the hompage of this site:

1. XHTML Mobile Profile
2. Valid Markup
3. Structure

Clicking on the failed tests, explains it further and also gives a link to “Help me fix it”. Therefore the next step for me is – to try to fix these mobile unfriendly errors. Will update this Blog post as I proceed. Subsequently will run this Blog through the entire site check of Ready.mobi.

In the meanwhile, please share your scores and fixes via comments.

Update:

AND THE HOME PAGE NOW SCORES 5 out of 5!!!

todo: testing on mobile after the changes, how I did it, possible contribution back to WordPress!

Update (May 30, 2009): After updating the WordPress Mobile Edition Plugin to 3.0.4 (refer to Browse this blog on a Mobile), I get a score of 5 out of 5. That is, no modifications required to get a 5/5 score at ready.mobi if you are using the latest version of the plugin.

The thinking turned into a quick action (finally) with this wonderful plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Noticed this plugin in my WordPress’s dashboard – under Plugin, Most Popular.

1. Downloaded and extracted the zip file.
2. Copied the resulting directory (wordpress-automatic-upgrade) under WordPress’s plugin directory (wp-content/plugins.
3. Activated the plugin through the WordPress’s admin panel.
4. Clicked on Manage>Automatic Upgrade
5. Followed the onscreen wizard “almost blindly”.

And voila! I’m now running 2.6. It took not more than a couple of minutes. I said “almost blindly” because I was dozing off to sleep while upgrading. That is, my blog was updated from my bed . Hence, WordPress upgrade made easy, very easy.

Update: Updated this Blog to WordPress 2.6.1 from 2.6.0 using this plugin.

Update (Oct 24, 2008):Today updated successfully to 2.6.3. Awaiting Wordpess 2.7 (ETA: November 10) which has drastic changes and updates. Will the Automatic Upgrade plugin still do its magic ?

Update (Nov 24, 2008):Today updated successfully to 2.6.5 – which fixes a security issue and a few bugs

Update (Dec 12, 2008):Today updated successfully to 2.7 - a version upgrade (as opposed to a mere release upgrade). WordPress Automatic Upgrade rocks. I doubted it for an upgrade to 2.7 (as said during the Oct 24 upgrade, above). But I’m proved wrong (fortunately). Following is the view of the new dashboard and UI of WordPress 2.7.

Wordpress 2.7 Dashboard

Note: After upgrade to 2.7, the “Email This Post” and “Print This Post” links on my blog stopped working with custom URLs (permalinks) These two features are given by the plugins named WP-Print and WP-Email. I fixed these plugins as per the instructions here. However, i guess, upgrading to the latest version of these plugins (via http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print/ and http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-email/) may also fix the issue.

Bottom line: Go for “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” to upgrade your WordPress to 2.7.

This app allows you to insert images, residing on your device, in your blog post. Like the one below:

You can select the category and add tags to the posts made from moBlog.