Wavr Plugin for WordPress

So boys and girls of waveland ( if you are not a member of Google Waveland yet,  come on in ! ), here is another Wave plugin for WordPress. It does something basic as of now, like most of the other plugins for Google Wave. But I see some serious work going on with this sourceforge.net hosted project.

Use this plugin to embed Google Wave inside a wordpress post, as easy as [wave id="wave-id"].This plugin implements the full wave embed api. Will include widgets for the sidebar in the near future. Features a TinyMCE button for embedding the wave.

You can download the plugin from here Official WordPress.org Page here

That’s the short description about the project. These guys are trying to create a community around this wordpress plugin, which is a good sign, and has an idea about what to do with this plugin in future releases. They are promising a sidebar widget in the next version.

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Few days back, I reached Chirag’s blog looking for one of his old blog posts. I wanted to add a link to that from my new post. But, his blog had no search box, and categories widget was missing from the sidebar. I had to click “Previous Entries” link a few times, and browse through all those pages to reach the article that I was looking for.

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Simple question, you may say. What should be the first widget on your sidebar ?. If you  spend lot of time on keeping sidebar active, and well designed, this question is very important for you.

The general trend

Usually, people keep any of the following as their first widget : ads, a welcome message, about me text, categories, rss feed link, .. ( sorry, that is a never ending list.)  People who do personal blogging, usually put an gif or jpeg with welcome message, and sometimes they list the books they are reading, or movies they watch. People who wants money from blogging try to put ads as their first widget.

But, which one should I put first ?

Okay, answering that question is not easy, since your blog is different from everyone else’ and so is your needs. So, you should find out which widget is the most important one.  I will help you to find the right one.

When you visit a new blog, or a particular blog post, what is the first thing you do after reading  it ? we take a look at the sidebar, right ? ( yes, obviously… and that is why the first widget so important ) … so think like this … what do you want the user to do after they read your first post ( or their first post on your blog, if they reached through google or a link ) …  your first widget should be an answer to this question.

Do you want them to read more of your blog posts ? list all the topics you cover on your blog ( categories widget ). Do you want them to click on ads  ? Do you want them to subscribe to your feed ? put an RSS subscription link …  and so on …   Isn’t that easy  ?

Links From Friends :

Kristarella redesigned her blog.
Binny’s eyes corrected themselves after 14 years !!

My Widgets are broken, with a theme upgrade … trying to bring them back …