Last time I posted about the wp-reactions plugin, I said that I planned on having a new version released by the end of the year.

The good news is that I’ve made considerable progress over the last six weeks overhauling the back-end to make it easier to maintain and expand. I’ve also learned a lot more about relational databases in the process, which is good for me if not the plugin users.

The bad news is that this process isn’t finished yet, so it’ll be a little while longer before there is a new version available. I hope that anyone out there who is waiting for a new release isn’t too disappointed.

Since posting my Gravatar how-to the other day, I’ve been thinking more about avatars in general. Specifically, I’ve been trying to figure out what makes a really effective avatar. I’ve distilled my musings into a  3 step avatar-creation process that I think will give great results. Read the rest of this entry »

So: Google Wave.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been in the Wave preview for about 2 weeks now. However, things only really got interesting over the weekend.

The invites I sent out finally arrived (yay!), but even then most of the interaction I did with others was limited to  “Yay! Google Wave!”. It seemed that beyond patting each other on the back for getting into the preview, we all had very little to say. Awkward. Surely we could come up with something to do with this fancy new piece of technology?

That something happened over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I needed some advice on how to get Struts and Spring to play nice together. I have a friend with more experience in that area than I, so I asked him. In Wave.

For about 5-10 minutes he tried to explain this in regular text, just like he would have done in IM. It didn’t go very well. Then he said ‘I wish there was a drawing plug-in for this’. ‘Hold on’, thought I. ‘This is exactly what Wave is for. There must be a gadget for that!’.

Here it is: http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=18016

Adding gadgets to a wave is a breeze. You just need the gadget’s xml link (provided on the page linked above) and then you insert it into a blip by using the ‘insert gadget by URL’ button when editing. It’s not entirely intuitive, but once you’ve done it once it’s very easy to do again.

The number and scope of available gadgets is growing all the time. Want some extra functionality? Chances are someone will have written a gadget for that. There are many reasons to like Google Wave, but I think this fact alone makes it well worth while.