I'm attempting to create a badge using shields.io for a GitHub project I'm involved in. Shields.io allows you to add your logo with base-64 encoding. Pretty cool, however it's pretty unwieldy to place into your readme. Given that I want to make it convenient for associated projects to paste our badge into their project, I don't want the markdown to be ten lines long.
I've noticed that not everyone has this problem. Gitter, for example has a very simple url for its shield that contains a logo.
Bithound also has a very nice badge url.
Are these special deals that they've worked out with Shields.io? Or is this sort of slickness available to everyone?
Shields.io has default support for a number of vendors displayed on the front page. Some of those custom integrations rely on corresponding logos: https://github.com/badges/shields/tree/master/logo.
I understand how having a large URL can be inconvenient. However, referencing external resources in images can yield unfortunate results, and is therefore disallowed (as does GitHub, which has had its share of sneaky DDoSes in the past years).
However, I believe using a URL shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl can help you have small URLs in your project files.
