Before I could even get ready to start reviewing Flock I had to see what it was like to install it. There were a few little niggles to sort out but generally it was pretty easy.

In case there’s anyone out there who’d like to give it a try in Linux Mint – here’s a guide on how to do it.

Tutorials > Linux > Install Flock in Linux Mint

After a little discussion and some information about how wordpress.com functions from mesanna I’ve quite quickly made the first demo version of a generated button. And here it is.

So far it’s really just proof of concept, and its code is a little limited but could very easily and quickly be improved, depending on what information you actually wanted to share. The reason I’ve put the date in for now is because it’s the simplest way to show the principle involved here. The date comes from the php function of the same name in this case I used:

date("D jS M - G:i");

What I’m trying to show here is that information available on the server side: databases, xml feeds, _POST and _GET requests, anything; can quite easily be transposed into a graphic without the need for java or anything that is blocked on wordpress.com. The sky is the limit!

The image src (if you look at the code) is actually:

<img src="http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php" alt="Linux Mint Button" width="181" height="60" ⁄>

If you visit ../button.php you will see the png. For now I’ve also added basic functionality to change the statement (the “Taste Mint” bit) to whatever you want. Just bear in mind the picture’s only 181px across and the logo takes up 50px or so of that.

So, if you add “?alt=Your Text” to the end of the above link, the button will change accordingly. Note just for clarity the entire url will then look like:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Your Text

So, if you were type something like this into your browser:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Minty%20Linux

You’d get a modified graphic just so.

Obviously, no programmer worth his salt would allow the user so much scope for editing your scripts in a working public version of this, it’s just to illustrate my point.

To further polish this, I’d use my .htaccess file to make an actual img url, something like promo-button.png so it appeared to the casual user that it really was just an image. The next step I think.

Thanks to facade47 on the forums for the font and reverend_nerd for his great button.

What do you think?

But I’m not here to start reviewing Mint… yet.

I had a little idea to further the promotion and I think I may spend some of this weekend coding some examples of it to try out on this site and in forum signatures. I think promotion nowadays needs relevance and needs to do and say more than a standard banner image ever could. It’s voice could probably do with being bilingual as well.

That’s why I think json requests/php generated images could be the way forward, or at least the first few steps. Combined with a strong theme and clever use of valid html (biggest pet peeve in the world is the number of “widgets” available for various platforms which are not coded correctly – flickr case in point) anyone could make use of this and promote the OS they love.

More thoughts to come.

Ben out.