If you want to distribute AIR applications the install badge is definitely the best way to go. The one problem I had with it is that its a pain to prepare and embed on your blog.

To help remedy this I started working on this AIR Badge plugin last night, it allows you to simply use an [airbadge] tag and a couple of arguments in your blog post which will then be replaced by the AIR install badge.

 

[airbadge] application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg [/airbadge]

[airbadge]Contact Manager, 

http://www.peterelst.com/downloads/sqlite/sqlite-contactmanager.air,

1,http://www.peterelst.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/contactmanager.jpg[/airbadge]

The plugin options page allows you to specify whether or not you want to embed the SWFObject javascript (only disable this if you already have it included in your WordPress template elsewhere).

The AIR Badge plugin is compatible with WordPress 2.2 and higher (version 2.5 recommended). To install use the following steps:

1. Download AIR Badge plugin

2. Unzip air-badge.zip
3. Upload the air-badge folder to wp-content/plugins
4. Activate the plugin

You can now start using the [airbadge] syntax in your blog posts to create an AIR badge for your applications.

Download here (version 0.6)

Note: this plugin uses the beta AIR Badge available from labs.adobe.com and includes SWFObject by Geoff Stearns (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/).

 

I plan to add support in the AIR badge plugin options page for setting badge colors, publisher settings and other default properties for the badge. For hosting I suggest you find a PHP hosting provider that is suitable for your web development projects.

You can support this project by helping to test it on your WordPress install and reporting any bugs or feature requests.

The code is released under a GPL license, donations are welcome if you find this plugin useful and want to sponsor my caffeine addiction ;)