(March 16 2006)
I really like Eric Raymond's Hacker Emblem Hacker emblem: glider (but I don't really agree with much else he produces).
I was a little disappointed with the little graphic badges and icons that are around … and although I'm happily playing with 80×15 badges for other things, it didn't seem to be particularly hackish to use that format for the emblem.
But look … surely we can hack a version in text? Nothing as clunky as
.O. ..O OOO
but something a little more _elegant_?
Well, with a monospaced font and a little kerning/line spacing CSS, we can produce something acceptable … try “space dot space CRLF dot dot colon”
<pre><code> . </code><br /><code>..:</code></pre>
Wrap that up in a div with this emblem class :-
.emblem {
letter-spacing: -2px;
line-height: 6px;
font-size: 10px;
text-align: center;
}
and you should end up with :-
<div class="emblem"><p><code> . </code><br /><code>..:</code></p></div>
I suppose I should also declare the font-family to be monospaced for luck, but the code tags seem to work OK :-) Good enough for nanoblogger, at least! In practice, I have to put nbsp entities into the page code to help the top line dot to align correctly in all browsers, but I can't quote these through Textile correctly at the moment. It might look right, or the top dot might be misplaced. It'll be OK in the site sidebars, though.
And note that the emblem isn't linked back to ESR's site. While I'll acknowledge his popularising of the emblem, and allow that perhaps it is his “invention”, I think it should live or die on its own merit.