Steal these buttons!

I’d always been quite annoyed by most “powered by” icons because they were intrusive and snide. “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” simply translates to “I’m too lazy to make this page look decent in all browsers”. Because of this fact I always kept all of my sites and pages free of any extraneous buttons or icons that weren’t directly beneficial to internal site navigation.

Enter consumer grade software. I seem to have become addicted to it. I always used to roll my own Web applications because everything else out there completely sucked. Now that projects like SourceForge have popped up there is now a steady supply of high quality Webware that is not entirely unusable. In fact, some of the Webware out there is amazingly stable, usable and actually secure!

As such, many open source projects require a “powered by” link on any page that uses their software. Other projects simply appreciate it and, since the authors have been generous enough to allow me to use their software for free, I feel inclined to give them a free shout out. So, I went on a search for compact “powered by” icons to replace some of the larger buttons I’ve seen floating around.

Fortunately, Taylor from gtmcknight.com has come to the rescue with his STEAL THESE BUTTONS! page! He has over 800 high quality ultra compact Weblog style buttons for perusal as well as documentation on the authors, instructions on how to create and upload, ideas for future button sets and news about the page.