» 11.0 countdown banner

Aside many other things, I'm currently hacking on a server-side "countdown to 11.0" banner rendering script. It all started with a post by Pavol Rusnak about Ubuntu providing a countdown picture on their website. It is indeed a good idea, and a few people decided to have a shot at it (for openSUSE, that is ;)). Not to discard what other people did (there are a few nice ones, actually), but our local design hero Jakub "jimmac" Steiner made one too and, as always with jimmac, it's brilliant. Now there were a few issues: it is heavily using Javascript to render the text (but sports a nifty fade-in animation thanks to jquery), breaks when people change the font size and isn't localized. The problem with the latter is really that you cannot access the user's preferred language that is sent in HTTP headers by the browser. So I started to hack a version that renders the Javascript code on the server and just "injects" the detected language into the Javascript code. Easy, and works. But then, in order to address the other issues mentioned above, I had a shot at a PHP script that renders the picture on the server. It is already functional, but not public yet as it has to be moved to opensuse.org first (should happen in a very few days). It's pretty well translated (en, de, fr, it, es, da, sv, no, fi, hr, hu, pl, cs, ru, el) and really fast. Also, it's plain PNG and doesn't require any Javascript at all. There's also a smaller version (original one is 256x256, small one is 130x130). Click on the picture on the left to see it rendered in different languages, as well as the large and small versions. If you can provide me with translations, then please send them to me by email: - "n days to go" (or "n days before release", or "only n days left", whatever works best in your language) - a singular version of the above, when n==1, as well as any other variant needed to cover your language (as an example, russian and czech have more than one variant) TODO: - think of what to display when it's day 0 ;) - think of what to display when the release date has passed - have it hosted on countdown.opensuse.org (as you might imagine, I'm open to suggestions on the 2 first items above)

So stay tuned, hope I'll have it done real soon.