Release counter for F9

[Nicu Buculei]

The release counter we had for F8 proved to be quite popular, so is 
natural to have this time another one, maybe with some improvements.
With the release scheduled for April 29, about a month from now, I think 
it is a good time to start planning it.

A first thing would be, IMO, to define when we start counting. I see two 
possible scenarios: either from a certain number of days in advance (30 
days sounds plausible) or from the Release Candidate.

For the graphics, I think we can base them on the Beta banner made by Mo 
  [1], but we can be open for another approaches.
I think is easy enough to get all the images pre-rendered in advance by 
the Art team and not rely on a cron job do produce them daily.

Embedding in the website in another part: for F8 we had something like 
01.png ... 15.png and the HTML was changed to include the proper image.
I see here a lot of potential for improvement: provide something that 
people can include on their own pages/websites/blog and spread the 
waiting game all over the web.
We can do that having a single image like f9counter.png updated daily, 
but this may not be very cache-friendly (people may get an old version 
from an un-updated cache), a JavaScript widget may be a better solution.

Please reply on the Art list about the graphics and on the Websites list 
about the implementation.

[1] - 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/PromoBanners#head-168c7c266a7785106...

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com
Cool Fedora wallpapers: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/wallpapers/
Open Clip Art Library: http://www.openclipart.org
my Fedora stuff: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro

[Ricky Zhou]

On 2008-03-27 02:22:46 PM, Nicu Buculei wrote:
>  For the graphics, I think we can base them on the Beta banner made by
> Mo  
>  [1], but we can be open for another approaches.
>  I think is easy enough to get all the images pre-rendered in advance by the 
>  Art team and not rely on a cron job do produce them daily. 
That might depend on
whether there's any text in image.  If there is
text, I've spoken to Mo about the possiblity of extracting strings for
translation (and automatically generating images for all
days/languages).  

>  Embedding in the website in another part: for F8 we had something
> like 
>  01.png ... 15.png and the HTML was changed to include the proper image.
>  I see here a lot of potential for improvement: provide something that 
>  people can include on their own pages/websites/blog and spread the waiting 
>  game all over the web.
>  We can do that having a single image like f9counter.png updated daily, but 
>  this may not be very cache-friendly (people may get an old version from an 
>  un-updated cache), a JavaScript widget may be a better solution. 
For F8, I think we
actually ended up including some javascript to update
the image (http://fedoraproject.org/static/js/release-counter.js).  All
of the URLs there are absolute (so anybody can include this script to
get their own counter).

Thanks,
Ricky