Google Voice

It's been several months now since I signed up for Google Voice. I haven't really used it much, but I did put a gadget on my blog, which allows you (the reader) to give me a call. What happens is that you enter your number and google will then call you and me separately and then connect our calls together. If you haven't yet signed up for google voice, I urge you to go and request an invite. Just point your browser to voice.google.com :) In a later blogpost, I'll show you how to turn your voice number into a gadget and host it in Blogger. By the way, it's great to see that I have 10 followers. Thanks to all of you for following my blog. I'll have to come and check out your blogs and see who's in the neighborhood.

How to Get the ID of a Wave to Embed?

I used to access Google Wave at the Wave Sandbox. The nice thing about the Sandbox was that there was a 'Debug' feature one could use to get the Wave ID. However, the debug feature is missing in the Public Preview (on https://wave.google.com/wave/):

So, there are two ways you can get your WaveID....

1) First, you can add the robot 'embeddy' (embeddy@appspot.com) to your wave, which will show you the waveID... The waveID looks something like: googlewave.com!w+SdCOCEZ5A

In fact, that is the google waveID for the wave at the bottom of this blog.


2) The other way is to copy the address from your URL in the browser bar, and strip out and convert the waveID yourself. The waveID will look something like the following: googlewave.com!w%252BSdCOCEZ5A

Notice that the waveID is encoded, so copy this value and decode the waveID using a decoder (e.g. http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/).

Make sure to decode twice! and you should see something like:
googlewave.com!w+SdCOCEZ5A


(hint: notice the !w+ )

Again, if you are on the Sandbox Developer (on http://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/ ) simply click on "Debug" -> "Get current Wave ID"

hope this helps :) if you wave, wave on my blog!

A Gadget to Embed a Configurable Google Wave

In a previous post "How to add a gadget to your blogspot blog", I used the Google Wave Embed API to embed a wave into my blog by editing the template. This is not very difficult at all, but then Ratscillion asked me about possibly creating a gadget to make it easier to setup and embed a Wave into the blog by using Layouts and editing the page elements.

I am very familiar with gadget development, so I thought the project would take me about 15 minutes. However, because of one very simple error that I just couldn't catch, it took me about 4 hours to finally get it working. Anyway, now any container that can host a google gadget (e.g. orkut, myspace, blogger, ning, etc.,) can easily embed a configurable gadget that will automatically embed the wave. If you'd like to see the wave embedded on this blog, just scroll to the bottom. Of course, keep in mind that if you don't yet have access to the sandbox, not only are you unable to see the functionality, but you're also missing out on a world of fun!

Anyone interested in embedding the gadget can just use this gadget spec

If you do use this gadget, let me know either in wave, or by commenting here so that I can stop by your blog or page and see it in action :) Also, please let me know if you have any suggestions for enhancements or find any errors :)