Welcome and a Happy New Year. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

The internet has come alive with free Christmas gifts for download. It was hard to choose from all that was available but I have tried to bring you a selection of the best. I have spent hours searching, likely a subconscious excuse to put off wrapping Christmas gifts.

Graphics and Icons

Smashing Christmas Icon Sets Smashing Magazine always has great resources.

Nicu’s holiday gallery contains these:

There are 16 icon sets to be found at FreshFreeStuff.net including social networking and RSS buttons - Free Christmas Holidays Icon Roundup . This is a selection from the sets available:

Gifts From Designers To You: Best Of 2008 - goodies include icons, fonts, wordpress themes and headers.

50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 including this Christmas set:

A set of Christmas smilies is offered by Christmas Corner, many of which are animated:

DigiScrapDepot.com has 3516 Christmas Freebies if you want to
decorate the pages of your Christmas photo scrapbook pages.

1stWebdesigner brings us a range of Photoshop brushes- 48 Snow, Ice, Snowflake and Christmas Brushes

Mel’s Photoshop Brushes gives us a set of Christmas Illustrator Brushes

A search for Christmas on Adobe Exchange shows a plethora of Illustrator and Photoshop images, gradients, patterns, shapes, styles and brushes.

Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers

25 Outstanding Christmas Wallpapers to Decorate your Desktop! from sagacious of Weird Resources

Vlad Studio has a whole range of Christmas Images/Desktop Wallpapers (higher resolution by subscription) and E Cards.

Wallco.net has a huge selection of free Christmas wallpapers in various resolutions - 42 galleries to date. I really went to town with these and created a whole folder of them to use as a My Pictures Slideshow Screensaver.

To create your own Christmas screensaver slideshow (or any other sort) in Windows XP - go to Desktop/Properties/Screensaver and choose “My Pictures Slideshow” in the drop down box. The default folder is My Documents/My Pictures but in settings you can choose any folder of pictures you want.

Not free but a good bargain - Woo Themes have a 4 for 1 special going until 24th December - $70 USD for a single licence and $150 for a developer licence.

Christmas Image Tutorials

Strobist lets us into some secrets of How to Photograph Christmas Lights using even a basic digital camera. I love Christmas lights although the ones I have appreciated the most this year were the new green and red lights in the car park of a newly renovated shopping centre which showed me the way which spots were free.

Smashing Magazine gives us 60 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Tutorials

PS Lover has a whole range of Photoshop Christmas Image tutorials but turn your speakers down as they advertise those very annoying smilies who keep saying “Hellooo”

What not to do when blogging

Finally but not least, Michaela Lica of eWritings has provided us with some good Christmas blogging reading by publishing her ebook Blogging Tips: How to be Cocky and Vexatious - a collection of blog entries that followed her 10 Ways to Make Your Fellow Bloggers Hate You meme.

Thanks to Design Bliss for putting me on to many of these freebies in their - Over 100 Free Christmas Design Resources - A Design Bliss Mega-List post

I am now off to join the teaming throngs at the shopping centre which is enough to provoke this Christmas emotion in anyone:

Popularity: 6% [?]

Brightening up your blog for Christmas may need the services of stock photo sites. There are plenty of sites offering free Christmas images and clipart but it is hard to find your way through popup ads and flashing glittery images (that is not intended for Christmas) to find something useful.

For Photos Morgue File, FreeFoto.com and Dreamstime’s free section offer a good range; Flickr too if you search for images that you are allowed to use. I always use the Compfight Flickr search site to look for Creative Commons images.

For Christmas Clipart, hellasmultimedia.com has a large selection of images, lines and borders and Clipart Guide has almost 500 images. Microsoft Office clip art library is always worth a look at for simple clipart.

If you want to easily add some graphics to Christmas Newsletters try one of the free Christmas Dingbat fonts. The one below is from Winter Yawns.

More ideas are welcomed. If you want to join in the Challenge please read Blogging Christmas Challenge for details. My Christmas Link Love List can be found on its own Christmas Page

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.

Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.

Dkret2

- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use - either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.

• A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
• Up to five Sidebars including 3 "footer" sidebars.
• Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
• Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
• Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview

Download from Wordpress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video

Mandigo

A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.

• Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
• 38 languages .
• Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
• One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
• Per page or random header images
• 7 Color Schemes - blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
• Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature

Download from Wordpress.org
Wiki

Royale

Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.

• A fluid-width layout
• Two or three-column
• 3 column layout - side by side or right/left sidebars
• Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
• Translated into thirty-eight languages.

If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.

Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage

onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking - smw theme

Starscape

This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.

• Theme Control Panel
• Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
• Customize header logo and background
• Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
• Sidebar customization - left and right or just one -
• Sidebar width options
• A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
• Icon customization
• Date Button for Posts and Pages
• plus even more features

Theme Control Panel

A selection of the built in styles

Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials

Tarski

by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.

This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.

• Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
• You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
• There are a number of different sidebar options

Theme Homepage
Download - Wordpress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum

Ikarus

Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.

• Theme options page and help page in admin
• Live theme preview in admin area
• 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
• Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
• Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
• Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins - popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
• 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
• 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
• 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
• CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
• MooTabs slider box
• Featured YouTube Video post
• Custom typography styles
• and more …,..

Download - Wordpress.org
Homepage and Demo

I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.

Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Premium Wordpress themes and theme sites have been springing up over the last couple of years, often catering for the increasing popularity of magazine style themes. Free themes have not always measured up to premium themes in design complexity and, at times, in their coding accuracy. The additional support offered with premium themes is also a draw card.

Theme Directory

For personal bloggers the cost of buying themes tends to outweigh their advantages. For those who are making money or promoting a business with their blog the price is less of a factor. The good news for those who do not want to spend money on themes is that the new Wordpress theme directory not only has a huge repository of themes but, to be eligible for inclusion, themes have to meet certain standards. This means that anything downloaded from the directory will work, without any coding glitches. That is the theory; although I would have thought that there are bound to be the odd few that fall through the net. Despite this we can feel much more confident downloading themes from the WP theme directory than from sites we don’t know and trust.

If you do want a magazine style layout you may still have to consider paying for a premium theme. The WP Themes Directory only has two tagged as “magazine”. There is however more good news, hence the title of this post. The site that brought us the premium Revolution Theme is going open source (under a GPL licence) as from 1st November. The themes will all be new (as it is not fair to offer the Revolution Theme itself after many have already paid for it). There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things (not yet specified) but the themes themselves will be free. More details can be found on the site of Revolution’s creator Brian Gardner - Revolution Going Open Source.

WP Limits is following the lead with some soon to be released free themes, including a “never before created knowledgebase theme”.

I have spent some time researching magazine style themes, free and premium, and have a post in the pipeline showing you my findings.

For Blogger users, there is a list of blogspot template sites on my Blogger blog.

Popularity: 10% [?]

The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around Wordpress.

From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it - despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.

As well as standard Wordpress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.

More technical aspects:

I chose Wordpress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and Wordpress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.

I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the Wordpress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.

My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.

A request

Please visit the site and have a bit of a read - your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item - it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask - or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.

Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.

Popularity: 9% [?]

As I was preparing my recent posts on images I came across image generator tools you may find a place for in some of your less serious posts.

Yearbook Yourself

Its amazing how much I look like my mother once I add a 1960’s look.

Wigflip

A range of generators including:

• Superstickies

• Easy Street - street sign generator

• Say What - add speech bubbles to an uploaded photo
• roflbot Add text to an image -create lolcat or lolband type images

Dumpr

Another site with multiple generators. e.g.

• Rubics Cube Generator - upload an image and turn it into a rubics cube

Doppel Me - create your own avatar.

Reflection Maker

Image Chef

There are many different kinds of generators at Image Chef - example:

• Fun Generators

Comic Strip Generator - choose backgrounds, characters and add your own text.

Create a graph

Why would you want to do this for fun you may be asking - well, you may want to submit them to graphjam:

Big Huge Labs Flickr Toys

LoonaPix - add frames and borders and trim your images

Why would want to create silly images?:

• As a break from tedious work.
• You need more practice perfecting procrastination
• To add special effect images to your blog and possibly get them Stumbleupon Photoblogged - hint hint.
• You want to be a star contributor on:
  • icanhascheezerburger sites (lolcats, loldogs, pundit kitchen….), althouth they do provide their own generator (if you need to learn lolcat speak try the Definitive Lolcats Glossary) or take a PAWS Universitee course
  • graphjam
• Just to be silly - the only reason needed?

Thanks to the Generator Blog for putting me onto some of the image generator tools- it would have saved me a lot of time if I had found this site to begin with.

Popularity: 12% [?]

How do you go about finding free images for your website or blog? I recently talked about the best sites for good free images but you may prefer to do a general search rather than looking within one particular site. This way you are likely to have a wider range of images to choose from.Some of the free stock image sites are aligned to non free sites and the free images may not be distinguished from the paid. It is frustrating to find an image you like on a free site to discover that it is from the paying site. Although it may not cost very much, you cannot usually just buy one image and have to purchase multiple credits. These credits will buy you more images but you may not need more; or not during the time you are given to use up the credits.

Image Search Tools

Creative Commons Images

• Creative Commons Search by Creative Commons - searches Google, Yahoo and Flickr for Creative Commons works. If you want to use an image on a non commercial site then you can use any image you find here. Additional search options allow you to look for:
  • only CC works that you can modify, adapt, or build upon, and or
  • works that can be used for commercial purposes.

Source: g-hat Flickr

• Compfight is a site that provides a quick method of searching for Flickr images. The results are displayed as quick loading thumbnails, 250 to a page. Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to the photo’s Flickr page. The option is provided to search within tags or all text for Creative Commons usage only or for Creative Commons commercial usage allowed. Still check the CC licence if you intend to adapt the image to make sure this is allowed.

• Flickr’s Creative Commons Page search for photos according to their type of Creative Commons License. I would use this if I knew I was going to edit a photo otherwise I find Compfight is quicker.
• Every Stock Photo - a search engine for free photos from many sources. View a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos or use the advanced search function to choose which sort of license you want.
• Firefox - Use the Creative Commons search engine that is built into Firefox by choosing the CC icon from the drop down menu to the right of the Firefox search box.

• Wikimedia Commons is a database of 3,089,392 freely usable media files which includes images from these sites.

Source Cool Image Bank Ios - memories of holidays long past

Images without Creative Commons search criteria

• Google Image Search comes up with a treasure trove of images but, as the search results contain images from all Google listed websites, you are unable to use a great deal of them; for copyright reasons. I do use this search but only for ideas when creating my own images and for personal browsing purposes. Today for example after doing an interview with Kuanyin on Blog Blond my interest in Maui was peeked and I ended up searching for images of Hawaiian volcanoes.

Source: mattsabo17 Flickr

• Pixsy - a search engine for images and videos, including stock photos. Allows search to be customized by criteria - vector graphics, black and white, greyscale and backgrounds, digital photos. Categories covered are: News, Celebrities, Sports, Travel, Viral, Video, Entertainment, Music, Stock Photos, Edge and Miscellaneous. (Pixsy is the search engine powering Compfight, Lycos image search, Mokoseek and various other sites that distracted me from writing this post)

Images from people you know

Ask a fellow blogger if they would mind you using an image from their blog - they may be pleased to allow it to get a backlink. How are these for pairs of crocs??

Source: Ultraviolet Observations aka Sueblimely’s daughter

I have justed added a new site to my free image post - a smallish collection as yet but very impressive - unprofound.com

Popularity: 11% [?]

I have spent considerable time researching the best sites to find online free images/stock images, along with their copyright/ Creative Commons licences. Some of these sites will probably already be familiar to you but others new, as they were to me. I hope you find this of use, as it makes the time spent all worthwhile. Sites are listed in alphabetical order.

Free Images

• BurningWell - a repository for public domain (free for any use) images. Donations welcomed - anyone have any Melbourne images they could upload, Melbourne is not represented there at all!

Waterlillies - Fiji

• Flickr Usage: image pages display their Creative Commons licences
• Free Digital Photos Dot Net - Royalty free images Usage: commercial and non-commercial.
• Free Photos Bank Usage: see terms
• Free Public Domain Photos You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial

Morning Glory

• Freerange Stock free stock photos - Freerange is an advertising revenue supported photographic community - photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions. Usage: commercial and personal.
• Free Web Page Headers - Usage: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
• freewebphoto Usage: Free for linked web use
• Image*After a free online photo and texture collection. You can download and use any image or texture from the site Categories covered: architecture, art, food, nature, industry, humanoids, human parts, landscapes, objects, vehicles. (pretty much everything) - Usage: commercial or personal but no redistribution.

• Kave Wall - Free Stock Photos, Images and Textures. Usage: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
• morgueFile - free high resolution stock photos. Usage: commercial personal.
• Openphoto is a wiki-based photography site. All images on the site are marked with Creative Commons attribution. Anyone can register and upload images. Users can browse or search by tags to find photos they are interested in.
• Pixel Perfect Digital Free Stock Photos Usage: Personal non-commercial use, restrictions apply for commercial use (also features premium low-cost images from Dreamstime).

• Microsoft Clip Art
• StockVault - stock photo sharing website. Over 100,000 images. Usage: Free for personal and non-commercial purposes.
• Stock.XCHNG - over 350.000 free user submitted images - terms of use vary but are displayed on each image page.

Smaller Free Image Sites

FreeImages.co.uk - over 2,500 free stock images. Usage: Only a link to site required. *

unprofound.com which was started by one photographer, Jim, has now grown to become a “a global collaboration of photographers” all generously sharing their work freely with the only restrictions seeming to be on redistribution of the photos. Check the FAQ if you are unsure. No attribution is required although I think that giving credit is the right thing to do wherever possible. Search is via photo color or photographer and a search tool still to be refined. I had trouble choosing only one image out of this wonderful collection of high quality photos and I hope to see this site grow and become well known.

Specialist Free Image sites

There are so many of these that I cannot mention them all here but I would appreciate it if anyone can recommend any that are worthwhile checking out.

These sites contain images relating to specific topics or genres, those that have been designated as public domain, creative commons or are of an age where copyright has expired.

• Gimp Savvy Photo Archive - images come from three main sources: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Usage: copyright free, some restrictions with regards to privacy for commercial usage.
• Old Book Illustrations includes galleries of animals, plants, landscapes, characters, scenes, buildings and monuments, science and technology and miscellaneous illustrations scanned from old books.

Source

• Plants of Hawaii - Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Agapanthus aka Mt Eliza leprosy Source

• The Best Copyright-Free Photo Libraries - a post on gov.watch with links to specific public domain (copyright free) government photo libraries.
• PhotoEverywhere UK Free Travel Images Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License - Free to share and remix with attribution. *
• Wikipedia:Public domain image resources includes links to sites of historical images, 2,600 realist painters (many in the public domain), copyright expired visual artworks, scanned images from old books, logos, stamps, US government sites as well as general collections.
• wellcome images -
  2000 years of human culture Usage: unless otherwise stated - Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial version 2.0 or Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales

Crystals of a DNA repair protein bound to DNA

Source Bernard O’Hara & Renos Savva, Wellcome Images

Personal Photo Sites

Personal sites where images are offered for download free of charge:

• PD photo.org contains public domain photos taken by the site’s owner, Jon Sullivan who also has a blog, aptly titled, Jon Sullivan

John reminds us that if an image is in the public domain then it must stay there. You cannot claim it as your own nor add any extra restrictions on its use. He also advises that it is wise to assume that no model release has been given for commercial use; unless stated otherwise or indicated by its Creative Commons Licence.

Future posts in this series will include image search engines, directories of free image sites, where to find low cost images, useful image tools and Firefox image tools. I know because most of them are written already

* New sites added since original post. Last update: 17 July 08

Popularity: 100% [?]