Wheezy countdown banners
Hi,
Inspired by Squeeze's countdown banners [0], I drafted some ideas in
order to provide the same functionality for Wheezy release, and maybe
even better.
[0]
http://web.archive.org/web/20110203001606/http://news.debian.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/squeeze_countdown.png
First of all, I created 4 different layouts for the banner [1], two
counting the remaining RC bugs (portrait + landscape) and two counting
the days to release (portrait + landscape).
[1] http://debian.org.ro/uploads/wheezy-countdown/
I used elements from Adrien's Joy theme, which is used as default in
Wheezy, and tried really hard to not disturb the general feeling of the
theme. I kept everything as paths in the SVG files, except the bottom
text, which is subject to changes and is rendered with monospace, so it
can be edited easily on almost any system.
Together with those, I crafted a sample script to edit the numbers,
which can be adjusted to read the new input periodically from any source
(I can do that, if anybody gives me the right pointers). Be aware that
the script relies on the existence of a special id attribute for the
fields to be changed, so it will fail if they are not there. I assume
that if further modifications will be made, one would use Inkscape too,
so it should preserve the ID attributes and values (it was added by/with
Inkscape in the first place).
I tried hard to not depend on any library in the script, so instead of
using some Perl module or anything like that, I relied solely on bash,
sed and grep for the replacement. Hence the ID restriction, since I
couldn't parse it as a regular XML file.
I see the following workflow:
* script is adjusted to read the data from the appropriate sources
* script is executed by cron at some interval
* at every iteration, flat PNG files are generated out of the SVG
graphics (maybe even on different sizes?)
* the resulting files are uploaded to a public $location, where
hotlinking done on various websites using them won't be a problem
* website $X using this will put a src attribute pointing to $location
on their banners
I encourage any feedback on the graphics, content, script or whatever.
I uploaded the files on my GitHub account [2], and the content is
mirrored on Gitorious [3] in order to provide a completely free
environment too.
[2] https://github.com/nightsh/wheezy_countdown
[3] https://gitorious.org/wheezy_countdown/banners
Cheers,
--
. o . Victor Nițu
. . o debian.org.ro
o o o nightsh @OFTC
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