The Geekorium

Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.

  1. The Massive (but not Exhaustive) List of Wave Resources

    When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

    But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

    More!

  2. New “Wave This!” Function and Buttons

    I was visiting Pamela Fox’s personal website, and noticed she had a Wave This! button attached to her latest post. Interested in what it did, I clicked it and it opened a summary of that post in Wave ready to share with others! I can’t find mention of the feature anywhere, and I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but a specially formatted URL takes a title argument, a content argument and passes it to a special new wavethis function as shown:

    https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=[insert title]&c=[insert content]

    Using a bit of PHP in WordPress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the Wave This! button over at the side. Feel free to use it!

    The PHP I used was as follows:

    <?php if ( is_single($post)) {
$excerpt = urlencode(get_the_excerpt());
$posttitle = urlencode(get_the_title());
?>
<a href="https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=<?php echo $posttitle ?>&c=%22<?php echo $excerpt; ?>%22"><img src="http://turbo.firstwaves.org/wavethis-button-dark.png" alt="Wave This!" /></a>
<?php } ?>

    Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).

    I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:

    So that’s the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you’re a developer I’d be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.

  3. Gina Trapani on feeling like an adult

    Most days I still feel like that painfully awkward, nerdy kid who had no friends parading around in a functional adult costume.Tue Apr 06 00:33:45 via SeesmicGina Trapani
    ginatrapani

    If one of my heroes — and a highly successful tech journalist and writer — feels like this sometimes, maybe it’s ok that I do too.

  5. Wave To Posterous

    Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

    It’s straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

    Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

    Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

    How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

    (via Kerrie Anne’s Fridge Magnets)

  6. Our job.

    They do what on the Internet?

    I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper — but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.
    Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?
    they exclaimed.
    As I was about to explain that actually the ‘net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.

    More!

  7. What I Write

    When I started writing in my blog (infrequently as it is), I never expected anyone to read it outside my friends and family. And I’m talking across the span of my life — I expected family and friends to visit my site occasionally and get maybe a few visits a year. Primarily, NunnOne is so that I have a place on the web that embodies ‘me’ when someone Googles my name.

    Of course, I kinda wished deep down that other people would find my little home and derive some small pleasure from reading about me and my thoughts, but I never seriously thought that it would happen. It still doesn’t really happen, but I do get a small number of visitors here that find me (mostly through Google) via a couple of topics that people seems to care about. One of them is Hercules Returns for which I still get many visitors (but few comments or repeat readers), and the other is my commentary on Fred Basset. These two topics are my most heavily found/read/commented-on posts but for different reasons.

    More!

  8. Welcome to My First Post

    This is it. I’m online. I have a web presence. Yay.
    It’s two days after Christmas. I’ve wanted to get online for a while, being an IT guy but I’ve kept not doing it. I suppose I’ve thought I’m not interesting enough, and I may not be, but now I don’t care anymore. So I’m here now. So I’ve spent about 5 hours getting my website setup, installing and uninstalling different options (as given to me by my provider).

    More!