The web is getting ready for Google Wave. There are more and more wave plugins and extensions coming out almost every day for this. Latest one here is Google Wave Embed extension for Mediawiki. This is a simple article that lets you learn the basics of using Google Wave on Wikipedia or Mediawiki.

What is MediaWiki ?

this is what their website says .. simple and easy to understand.

MediaWiki is a free software wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and bymany other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.

What Does this Extension DO ?

The GoogleWave extension makes it possible to embed Google Waves in your installation of MediaWiki using the The Google Wave Embed API. So, in future we may see Google Wave in a Wikimedia entry, letting you do more on that Wiki Article.  If you have your own MediaWiki installation, this is great news for you also.

How to Embed a Wave in a Wiki Article

Now, here is the howto part, or the technical knowhow on adding Google Wave in to a Wiki entry. This can be achieved with the wave-tag and id attribute like this:

<wave id=”wavesandbox.com!w+TwgH-jM-%B” />

Place the tag in your regular WikiML code in any page and you should be good to go (you must of course change the id to the actual id of the wave that you want to embed).

The MediaWiki wave tag now supports all the attributes that a wave can handle. That means, you can change following things on the wave, ( mainly how it looks, and its size )

• id (required)
• height
• width
• color
• bgcolor
• font
• fontsize

Need more info ? Click Here.

Plugins are something new that you are going to find on your dashboard while moving to self hosted wordpress blog. Plugins, as the name suggests, adds more features and addons to your blog.

Most Popular Plugins:

WordPress.com stats – so that you won’t miss your stats as you used ton wordpress.com blogs. This plugin needs a wordpress.com API code, which you fill find on your wordpress dashboard ( link )

All in One SEO – For SEO crazy bloggers. I have installed it, but not sure how to make the best out of it. Yep, I am not a SEO guy.

Auto Tager : Suggests and adds tags automatically when you write, edit and publish your blog posts. Very useful.

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So, thinking about moving to “self hosted wordpress blog” ?  learn how to find, upload and edit your themes

There are tonnes of themes available for you to download. Most of them are free. They are free themes way better than some paid ( or premium themes ). So, think twice ( or more than that ) before you purchase a paid theme.

The best way, will be to google a little. Try Google or you can go to  WordPress’ Official Website. Also, there are brilliant theme designers, with themes that will fall in love with. Here is one of my favorites, pearsonified.com

ps: I will keep updating you guys about beautiful themes that I find during my theme hunts, so subscribe to the RSS feed, for more

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