Hello to my new blog, which will be about my work as a Debian Developer and other things, which cross my mind. The focus will be on Debian work though.

This blog won't have comments and that is intentional as I prefer not to receive any unfriendly mails from lawyers. If you want to give feedback, just send me an e-mail.

When you want to offer creative work, or at least your blog posts, under a license which gives the receivers a lot of freedoms, you'll sooner or later come across the Creative Commons licenses. And after you've selected a license of your liking, you'll be presented with a little XHTML snippet. Nice. What's not so nice is, that you'll break the validity of your website as soon as you put that snippet somewhere on your homepage. What to do?

Easy. Ask the W3C for help (ok, don't call them, just use a search engine). Since Tim Berners-Lee is promoting the semantic web for some time now, there must be some conformant way to add the information, which hopefully is also supported by standard-compliant browsers. The answer is a W3C recommendation. The recommendation talks only about XHTML 1.1, but there's also a XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPE (If you don't care about IE, you can use the XHTML 1.1 variant, at least the last time I checked, IE failed miserable with XHTML 1.1. Admittedly, it has been a while since I looked this up.). Just put:

at the top of your document. Depending on what RDF namespaces you want to use (and how often), you can add more namespaces than the default one to your html tag. So a template for a "XHTML 1.0 + RDFa" document might look like:

  
    
    
  

  
     
 Your HTML content here 
     
[Website Title] by [Author's Name] is licensed under
       Creative
         Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless
         noted otherwise.
     
  

When you're finished, you can start adding licensing information (and other relations) to your website as this little blog is doing.

Some might remember, that I have been asked in the past to add Flattr to the available support models. And after considering this a little more, I wanted to add support options to my blog too. So I looked into the different options already available and found, that while Flattr offered a donation option, they had no graphic available like the PayPal donation button. Thus I contacted the Flattr guys and they responded almost immediately by sending me a tarball with two images and an example HTML file. You can see that in action below (this is the ECMAScript version, the CSS version can be seen on the right side of this website):

If you want to use it on your own homepage here is, what you need to do:

1. Download the images (normal, hover) to your server/webspace.
2. Add the following to the page(s) where you want to see the Flattr donation button:
   
   
   You need to replace [USERID] with your registered user name.
3. You're done!

You can, of course, also just download the first image and skipt the whole hover effect stuff. And, of course again, you can also use CSS to implement the hover effect, as I do it on this site. In that case just remove the img tag from the code snippet above, add a unique id (let us assume it is flattrDonate) to the a tag and add the following to your style sheet:

#flattrDonate {
        display:        block;
        background-image: url('/imgs/flattr_donate_normal.png');
        width:          56px;
        height:         21px;
}

#flattrDonate:hover {
        background-image: url('/imgs/flattr_donate_hover.png');
}

Obviously you need to change the URL to point to your copies of the two images.

As I'm asking for donations to help cover the traffic costs for the wine-unstable packages I provide and to support my Debian work in general if appreciated, I thought a "Thank you!" to all those who've donated something so far would be in order (don't worry, I won't disclose any names of donators or other personal information).

Thus here we go: Thank you! It's much appreciated.

For all those who just read this and think they'd like to donate something too, if just they could locate the links to do so, here they come:

• PayPal (general donation link, the wine-unstable specific link can be found on the package page
• Flattr:
  • general Debian work
  • wine-unstable packaging (traffic)
  • donate through Flattr (you need to be logged in, otherwise the previous link will redirect you to the main page)