About ten days ago, I released a couple of “Made on Ubuntu” badges to put on websites made in Ubuntu. Now I have decided to make some general “Made on Linux” buttons, and I’ve decided to rename the project “Made on Linux” - as that includes Ubuntu as well.

So far, these are the changes I have made:

• Added four more badges featuring Tux.
• Added some nice JavaScript effects to show and hide the sample code.
• Changed the text to reflect that this is now not only for Ubuntu.
• Changed the URL to blastfromthepast.se/linuxbadges
• Added a redirect so that people who visit the old URL get sent to the new one.

Things still to do:

• Add more badges for various distributions.
• Make it easier for people to just copy’n'paste a little code into their website and have the badges be displayed.

Be sure to visit the site now, and please email me if you’re planning on using any of the badges!

“Made on Linux”

In the Mac iLife suite there’s a web page builder application that many Mac users seem to be using to create their personal websites. Being that this is an evil Apple application, the program automatically slaps a badge saying “Made on a Mac” on the footer, as to advertise to the world that any moron can create a website with a Mac.

A member at Ubuntu forums had noticed this, and put forth the idea that Ubuntu users should get a similar badge to display on their websites - that is, if they made it on Ubuntu. I kind of liked the idea, even though it might be seen as slightly unfair to Linux users who are using other distributions -  but on the other hand, the only people who would click on such a badge are people who don’t already know what Ubuntu is. In other words, Mac or Windows users.

So I sat down and created some badges…

Fast forward a few hours, and not only had I made 4 awesome looking badges, but I had also created a pretty neat website to hold them all!

If you have created a website on Ubuntu, go get one of the badges!

As the developer base for Caffeine has grown larger, we’ve realized that we needed some place to organize information and hold development discussions. Launchpad is great for hosting code, keeping track of bugs, organizing blueprints, etc. It even works as a front-end for translators. But it really lacks a place for proper discussions and there’s not really any space for end-user information.

Therefore I went ahead and created a wiki for our project!

The Wiki is powered by MediaWiki and is hosted at Levonline (who are graciously providing hosting for this blog). Setting it all up was very easy, and probably took less than half an hour. If you’re looking to set up your own Wiki, I highly recommend trying MediaWiki.

→ Here’s the link to our project wiki.

There you will find any and all information about Caffeine.

I’m torn. With the launch of Firefox 3.5, the new video tag might finally kick off for real - allowing you to embed video files in your webpages, which makes hosting and delivering your videos pretty much painless. Flash videos have been around for ages now, but Flash support in Linux is not great, and you need to get some sort of flash video player (I recommend Flowplayer) before being able to embedding them. Of course you also have to transcode your videos to the flash video format.

Of course, if you’re using flash videos you can always use an online service such as YouTube to offload some of the hosting to someone else. If you’re running a website with a lot of traffic, that could be a real money-saver. But if that’s not a problem for you, for example if you don’t have a lot of traffic (or if you’re filthy rich), hosting your own videos might be a good thing - as that will allow you to embed them in whatever format you choose.

On the other hand, not everyone has a browser that supports the video tag, and unless you have a flash video to fall back on, you’re excluding them from viewing your content.

I think that for now I will probably keep hosting my videos on Youtube and embedding them in flash format. While I’m no fan of the .flv format, I realize that from an SEO perspective, hosting the videos there gives me some extra exposure - and that’s always good!

What about you? Will you be sticking to flash video or will you move on to bigger and better things?

While casually stumbling my way across the vast internetz, I came across a blog post by Michael Lopp, a software engineering manager and weblog author. This blog post completely captivated me and put into words what I truly feel is an accurate explanation of why I do some of the things I do, and for those of you living with a geek spouse, it can really help you understand certain things about your spouse that might have been a mystery to you.

I’m sure that if you consider yourself a geek, you’ll identify with most the things in this article. Keep reading to read the post in full. A link to the original source is available at the bottom.

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