Zirrus is a nifty little online to-do list manager. All very ajaxy and web 2.0.

For WordPress bloggers, Slickr Gallery is a

bandwidth-friendly AJAX photo gallery plugin for Wordpress. It allows you to pull your Flickr-hosted photos into a gallery section of your blog, as well as easily add Flickr-hosted images to your posts and pages. It is especially useful for people with many Flickr albums/photos. Slickr Gallery needs a Lightbox plugin to work properly.

A lovely photo of an umbrella by Ana.

If you have more than a handful of domain names to manage, the domain log book might be useful. Cough, Lionel, cough.

And because it’s Friday, a collection of cute puppy and kitten pictures from Warren Photography.

In case you missed it, Eddie’s baaaaaaaack!

And finally

Gia and Mark have posted the (previously) toppest of top secret trailer for Danny Boyle’s new film, Sunshine. Sadly non captioned but it looks a cracking good film and will definitely mean a second trip to the cinema this year (the last time was to see the disappointing-even-though-Kevin-Spacey-is-in-it K-PAX).

Second place goes to Jan Zabroda for this wonderful picture of the Magic Forest banner (created for last year’s festivities).

Third place to Lionel for the Mince Pies entry.

Here’s the completed poll and here’s a reminder of the banners.

Thank you everyone!

Is it too soon to have another competition? Oh, I don’t think so…!

There has been some muttering that the cd prize might contain (*sharp intake of breath*) tracks by the esteemed Ms Black and Mr Humperdinck.

Ah no. I’ve been studying your festive memes, particularly the favourite Christmas track question, so rest assured will be the epitome of Christmas good taste and cheer…

Meanwhile, a few Christmas links to hopefully get you in the mood for a little banner creation:

• Stock photos for Christmas at Stock Xchng.
• Elf Yourself – with a nifty crop, zoom and rotate toolset you too can add your own picture and create a dancing elf e-card for friends and family.
• From Flickr, Gustav the red-nosed weimareindeer.
• Conspiracy Carols lets you add a “secret” message to a Christmas carol. Hmm.
• The Joy of Baking Christmas collection. Yummy.

Update: I’ve now updated the page with the 11th banner. Stupid, stupid woman.

To save you hitting the refresh button endlessly I’ve put all of the banners on one page with notes on the image source and font used where known.

Where known? Oh yes indeed. Because some of those banners have been contributed by our friendly neighbourhood bloggers and I thought the creative amongst you might also like to have a go at creating one. Or two…

So you have until midnight GMT on Friday, 15 December to chew the ends of numerous pencils and come up with some lovely Christmas/holiday/winter banners. Want to know more? Read on…

The nitty gritty

1. You can either send your image by email to [my name] @ [this domain name dot com] or upload it to a place I can download it from.
2. If you’d like the source .psd file, let me know and I’ll send it to but you could also just send an image (.jpg, .gif, etc.) that’s 846 x 185 pixels and I’ll slot it in a a new layer to the PhotoShop file.
3. The red used for the font and dividing line at the bottom is as always #990000 but feel free to use your own choice of colour(s).

Rules

Um…. I don’t think there are any. Except that the image and font must be free to use (see Resources below).

Prizes

You know that song Money’s to tight to mention? Quite. So the prize will be a lovingly compiled Christmas cd and will be mailed to the winner on Saturday 16th, hopefully reaching you in time for the Christmas festivities.

Resources

You can use your own images or raid the cupboards at free stock photography sites like Stock Xchng, die Blen.de and StockVault.

There are oodles of fonts to choose from at places like Urban Fonts, YouFont, WestWind, FontSo and Better Fonts.

And finally

If you’d like any of the banners modified for use on your site, leave a comment and I’ll whizz it off to you by email.

Good luck!

Update: had a sudden flash of inspiration: checked the .htaccess file (empty) so clicked on the Permalinks tab in WordPress Options, copied the text from there, added it to the old .htaccess file, uploaded and renamed it and bingo, we should be back to normal. Well when I say normal…

My new mantra:

“A post a day, come what may.”

But first, a spot of bloghopping!

• Shirley Kaiser of Website Tips, Brainstorms and Raves and SK Designs has a new book, Deliver First Class Websites: 101 Essential Checklists. Two chapters are online (in html rather than pdf so no sign-up needed): Chapter 12, The Ultimate SEO Checklist and Chapter 14, The Ultimate Testing Checklist
• Miraz Jordan and Maria Langer’s WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide) looks especially useful for those of us getting to grips with the intricacies of WordPress.

Although I don’t have the budget for books at the minute and can’t vouch for them personally (yet), both books come highly recommended via other list members and are definitely high up there on my list of books to be coveted.

And finally…

How will your obituary read when you pop your clogs? Find out at Quiz Galaxy (thanks to Croila).

But I’ve had a shower, slathered on some antisceptic cream and they’re just quietly throbbing. And I feel like such a crybaby.

So let’s move on to something I installed earlier, Roel Muerder’s WordPress plugin, WP-SingleMP3 for Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Single MP3 player.

Pete Seeger singing Little Boxes:

Now this is the hilarious Liverpool radio clip posted earlier this year. Either hamsters have invaded the studio or something’s happened to the playback speed… Is it something to do with compression of the original file? Enquiring minds wish to know. But not just yet. Let’s enjoy the hamsters.

* Finding that picture led me to the Humungu Tongue. Yes I will be searching for them in the UK and yes I will take pictures when found.

Topics so far:

• What is a programming language
• Server-side vs. client-side programming
• Installing PHP on your computer
• Write your first PHP script

It looks as if more tutorials are on the way plus there’s a blog and a forum. Excellent stuff.

If I want to see more than the 3 bookmarks on my homepage I have to click on “View All” which takes me to another page. And then, if I want to add a tag to one of my bookmarks, I have to click “Edit Details,” which takes me to another page where I enter the tag and click “Save” which changes the page to show the current details for that bookmark.

Then, if I want to go back to my list of bookmarks, and click on “Bookmarks” in the top nav and I go back to the homepage, which only has my last 3 bookmarks, and I have to start all over again!

But it’s so pretty! So I’ve decided to stick with Ma.gnolia for a while, have installed Barry Price’s Ma.gnolia plugin 0.1 (if your host supports PHP5 you can use the more recent 0.2 version) and the link feed will display over there in the far right hand sidebar.

I’d love to keep the links here permanently (port them to an archive page after a certain period of time/number of links?) but I’ve no idea how to go about it. Any suggestions happily accepted.

Oh and while I remember, does anyone know what font is used in the Ma.gnolia logo?

The only plugins I have activated are:
AutoMeta
Exec-PHP
Live Comment Preview
MiniPosts

and I’ve not changed anything since upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2 a few weeks back.

Any thoughts on what I can do to fix this?

Later…
Um, I should have suggested an email since the problem is the inability to comment… daisy AT chasingdaisy DOT com. Murky buckets.