Remember those snazzy badges I made some time ago? Well, after having been featured on OMG! Ubuntu! I felt like getting back on the proverbial horse and make some more badges. So I did. I’m not crazy about the font situation, but Arch’s official font seems to be Liberation Sans - so that’s what I’m going with.

As usual, there is one color and one monochrome flavors, both with low-opacity versions. Sticking them on your website is super easy. For more information on that, go check out the Made on Linux page.

If you want me to make badges like these for your favorite distribution, simply shoot me an email (my email is available on the contact page). There are some distributions that I can’t make badges for because of copyright reasons, but I promise I’ll do my best.

I know this post is probably a couple of years late by now, but when I reworked my “Made on Linux”-page, I needed a way to display some information only when the user wanted it - without having to have multiple pages to send the user to. In other words, I needed to be able to hide a chunk of text, and then show it when the user clicked on something.

As I am no JavaScript wizard, I originally found this technique somewhere else, and got help from people over at StackOverflow to make it fit my needs. Sadly, I’ve now lost the original source, and Googling has led me nowhere. If the original author reads this, please email me and I will of course attribute you.

Read the rest of this article »

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”

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?