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.

Early in May a new flatmate came to live with me: Josephine!

I waited long for this to happen and can't tell how glad I am to finally have her with me. Her arrival was heralded by fire and the smell of many burned things and like thunder and lightning she entered her rightful place here.

Enough introductions, I'd like to present Josephine to you:

Before I close this post, I'd like to thank An-U (German homepage), the artist, for painting this awesome piece of art!

I just saw, that Josephine made her appearance in An-U's deviantArt profile a few days ago. Go, and have a look at her other stuff.

This year is in its last throes and a few things, that don't really warrant their own blog post, have piled up here. To get them out of the door before 2012 starts, I'd like to go over them in the next few lines.

First: there seem to be a group of rather cheap people who want to have the Humble Indie Bundle #4, but don't like to give at least 0.01 USD. Really guys, you seem to have enough money for a fast-enough computer and a (broadband) internet connection (otherwise downloading the circa 2.8 GB of games won't be a lot of fun), but you don't have the 0.01 USD to spare? If you don't like closed-source games (a sentiment I can truly understand, in fact, that was something I really pondered before buying) then just don't play them. But searching for a torrent for the HIB#4 while it is still being sold to just avoid paying the minimal fee, I can't understand. Now, some might wonder how I know this. The easy answer is, I blogged about buying the HIB#4 and mentioned, that I downloaded the games through a torrent (you can choose between direct downloads and torrents on your "login page") and a lot of people started hitting the blog entry with a referrer from a search engine, showing they'd searched for "humble indie bundle 4 torrent". Please make a decision: don't play the games or if you wish to, then pay something. The people behind those games make it easy and, in comparison to many other game studios, a fair offer. That should be worth something.

For those of you who loved Josephine, there is a new awesome piece of art, Creative Commons licensed, by An-U (German homepage). The title (and the drawing) are derived from the equally awesome Katzenjammer song "On the Devil's Back" (in case you're still looking for a present, you might want to consider one of their CDs or a ticket to their next concert near you).

Then, I wanted to thank all those people, who donated something over the course of 2011! Thanks a lot, especially for showing me, that you liked my services/work enough to even consider a donation! It means a lot to me, to know this.

At year's end everybody is doing statistics and while I won't bore you with long in-depth analysis, I thought I throw out, what the top posts/things where (so far). Maybe you find yourself represented in there or maybe you find something new. In no particular order:

• My unofficial wine-unstable packages generated a lot of traffic and back links.
• The mini-tips series had many hits.
• My two posts (1, 2) about the Linux graphics stack garnered a lot of attention.
• The note about removing Sun's Java implementation was the first post to be mentioned in a Debian Project News issue.
• Right after my wine-unstable packages, my post about OSM and OpenLayers generated the most e-mails.
• The YouTube playlist fetcher is also pretty popular, though the Greasemonkey script collection has been picking up speed recently.

I hope your 2011 was a good year and I wish you all the best for 2012! I'm pretty sure Debian will continue to grow, but there is also a lot of work ahead, maybe you can join the effort and make Debian that much more awesome!