The Google Wave “Wave This” function takes the title of a post and a short description and starts a new wave for you to add users to. It uses the “Wave This” API.

This sidebar widget adds a button to individual post pages that sends the post title and exerpt to Wave. If you haven’t set an exerpt the widget uses the default one generated by WordPress for each post. The default button is 300px wide to allow for larger sidebars. Please resize the button using the widget options.

Update 16–06-10: Added the official button options from Google.

Latest Version

Version 0.3

Known Issues

• Settings are not persistent across updates. I’ll try to build this in soon.
• Does not use the official “Wave This” buttons from the API page. The official buttons can be linked though using the custom image feature. Fixed: see update 16–06-10
• Does not support Wave for domains other than the Google Wave Preview.

Support

If you need help with the Wave This Widget, leave a message here, or on the WordPress Support Forum. At the risk of fragmenting the support, you can also get in touch with me on Google Wave, or leave a message on the official plugin wave (embedded here).

Warranty

No warranty is given for this plugin.

Wave This Widget for WordPress is a post from The Geekorium

Totally.

So anyway, I made cupcakes today. To be fair I live with two girls, so I did it for them. Monnie is running a Cup Cake Camp soon, and being the chef of the family felt like I would probably end up being the one to make cupcakes for it, so I thought I had better practice.

Then Elle showed off her baking skills, and Twitter is talking about it non-stop, so being the sheep I am I jumped on the bandwagon.

And I gotta say, if you make your cupcakes right, they are awesome. None of this lemon icing crap, or straight vanillaboringpants flavour. I made mine with 70% cocoa chocolate cherry ripes, 70% cocoa chocolate ganash icing, and glace cherries on top…

So I don’t care if it’s not totally manly. They were totally tasty, and I’m totally in Mil’s good books for making them.

And if you’re nice to me I’ll make them again (or something similar) for Cup Cake Camp Adelaide!

Rocketships, Monster Trucks and FLAMETHROWERS is a post from The Geekorium

But determined not to be beaten, I found a nifty little MP3–playing SWF (flash program) that I could install on a webserver somewhere and point to the TripleJ MP3 stream. The player I used is created by neolao, and is very easy to use. I used their “generator” page to build the embed code I needed, and downloaded the player. I created a simple webpage that includes the embeded code (feel free to steal the “source”), and uploaded and pointed to the player hosted on my site. It points to the TripleJ stream, but could easily be adapted to play any other mp3 file or stream. The page is at http://nunnone.com/radio/ and I’ve added it to my Wii’s favourites menu so Mil can find it quickly when she wants some radio. It’s a very basic page, and the same site has many different versions of the player to do more — in fact if Radio National did an MP3 stream as well, I would create multi player so Mil could choose between the two stations.

I can even embed the stream right here, so enjoy!
Edit: removed — see update.

Update 2009-09-06: Using the Homebrew channel to add radio

The biggest problem with the the Wii browser is that it can’t drop the stream, so the buffer fills up eventually and crashes. I tried a few MP3 flash players including one that suggested it could overcome this by playing two streams in sequence for five minutes each and dropping them one at a time to clear the buffer, but I couldn’t get any of them working reliably so I gave up for a while.

Then Lifehacker posted this article about how to add the Homebrew channel to your Wii with just an SD card, and I gave it a shot. Then I downloaded the Homebrew Browser and copied it into an “Apps” folder I created on the same SD card. With that installed I downloaded the MPlayer Christmas Edition from the browser, and finally edited the menu.conf file in the Apps\mplayer_ce folder to add Internode’s stream to the Radio menu with the following line:

<e name="TripleJ" ok="loadlist 'http://media.on.net/radio/117.pls'"/>

Now I can play Triple J for free on my Wii, Mil is happy again, and I can also play DVDs, TV shows and music streamed form my PC!

Yay for lazyhacking!

Triple J radio stream on a Wii is a post from The Geekorium

She’s still cute though right?

She looks like this? Poor thing!

Can you see it? is a post from The Geekorium

It’s like Frankenstein built a logo

A couple of people liked the idea, but thought the typography was lacking. So the next day I had a go at sprucing it up, and re-doing the typography.

Getting there. Better colours and font choice.

I’m much happier with this, but I thought it was still missing something. So yesterday I made up the following. I really like it. Mil thinks its a little less clear, but I think you can see a bit of the Aussie outback in it now which is a nice touch (if I do say so myself). In case you’ve missed it, the logo is a stylised Australia, made of concentric rings (the de-facto symbol of podcasts) with a wire-in-circle in the centre to emphasis the “tech” or perhaps the “wired” in the name. I chose orange as it’s the colour of RSS feeds, but it doesn’t need to be orange — it could be any colour.

Font=Nevis Bold by Ten by Twenty.

This helped me settle on a final form for the typography, and I decided to put together a logo pack to showcase the versatility of the logo in different forms. They don’t quite meet the requirements of the competition though, so I’m posting them here rather than cluttering up the forum the competition is running on.

First up, a horizontal version that separates the typography from the logo. The original brief asked that the logo contain the title “Tech Wired Australia” but I feel that a true logo needs to stand alone. I created this version to give a sense of how the logo could stand by itself to some degree within the design.

My favourite design. Doesn’t meet the brief. Discarded

Next up, a mono-colour version as an example of how you could use the logo in a less colourful design (perhaps as a promotional badge, or on a sub-page you wish to stand out from the main site in some way).

Ooh, shiny and dark

The next two styles are just variations I tried, that although not as visually appealing as the few designs above, show the versatility of the design and some of the possibilities.

Meh.

No orange sea. No work as well.

Finally, just for fun, and as a bit of cheeky poke to help tip things in my favour, I’ve included an iPhone bookmark icon, and a couple of favicons.

Can you blame me for trying?

Hopefully this has been a little insight into my creative process. Check out the thread, and let me know how my attempt compares to some of the others. All constructive criticism welcome!

Please note: the designs showcased here are not under my usual Creative Commons Licence. I reserve all right to them up to the point that they (might) become property of the Tech Wired team. You may not use them to create derivative works, or use them in your own products.

Update: 2008-11-05Minutes after I posted this, and put up my final submission they announced the winner! And it wasn’t me… But that’s OK, because they offered me a conciliatory $20 iTunes card because they liked my logo and want to use it on their website. You see the key here is, I misunderstood the brief — they wanted a “podcast logo”, and it didn’t click for me that this meant some thing like album art to display in iTunes. Clearly the person who won understood this immediately. I came at the whole thing thinking they were going to re-design their website. I’m kinda glad I misunderstood though, as if I’d realised what they wanted, I possibly wouldn’t have have bothered, and then I wouldn’t have learned what I learned from this competition. Including this tidbit: if the brief is unclear, get it clarified before you produce something the client doesn’t really want!

Logo Design: Tech Wired Australia logo competition is a post from The Geekorium