Blog pulse

I need to refocus on the book, but you’ll be seeing the tangible aspects of writing a book on web graphics throughout my web sites in the weeks to come. For instance, if you’re using an SVG capable browser, you might notice the ‘squiggle’ line across my header. That’s my ‘blog pulse’. It reflects my updated comment count for the last 80 posts. Of course, you know what this means: if my blog pulse straight lines flatlines, my weblog is dead. You hold the life of my blog in your hands.

Currently the ‘pulse’ isn’t viewable to IE or other non-SVG enabled browsers. The Adobe SVG Viewer won’t pick up the SVG, as I’m embedding the SVG directly into the page’s XHTML. That’s the whole reason I bit the bullet and converted to XHTML in the first place.

I could convert the example to using the Canvas object and Google’s ExplorerCanvas library, or perhaps use Sam’s SVG to Silverlight Workbench. Frankly, even though I have a lot of visitors using IE, as long as the information represented in the graphics is either available in other formats or non-essential, I may just blow off IE.