Google Wave Bots

In an attempt to make the instruction pages as real as possible I had contemplated embedded mini waves into each page to show bots usage. The bad part about that was that the waves would need to be public (anyone could edit and deface them) and that only current wave users could see them. I was trying to avoid having to put screenshots in as that could take a lot of time and most users would not want to go that far. I decided to try my hand at re-creating the blip look with html and css. I think I did a halfway decent job and below is a screenshot of the end result.

Template for the wiki that shows a fake wave

For those who know mediawiki templates, you will have no problem using this one. For the rest, you can just copy/paste the following code and make your small changes.

For bots that respond to your blip with a new blip, use the “wave” template:

{{wave

|trigger=<what you say to get the bot to respond>

|bot=<bots address (eg. bouncy@appspot.com)>

|response=<what the bot said in response>

}}

For bots that edit your blip, use “wave2″ twice as a before and after:

My text:

{{wave2

|bot=<In the first of 2 blips, this will be “Me”>

|response=<In the first blip, response will be what you say to the bot>

}}

Bots change:

{{wave2

|bot=<In the second blip, if the bot edited your response, it would be “Me (and botsname@appspot.com)”>

|response=<This would be what the bot changed your text to>

}}

If anyone has any improvements for this mediawiki template, please feel free to let me know. I am by no means an html/css expert and am more than willing to take hand-me-down suggestions.