Many have noticed that the Pharyngula banner has been gone for a few weeks. This is a completely independent problem from our recent (and still ongoing) access bugginess. For some reason, our tech guy hosted all those images on the Amazon web server when setting up the pages, and Amazon has either locked us out or reorganized their directories, and they aren’t loading any more.

The easy solution would be to put the images in some other accessible place, and tweak the code to redirect it to load from the new address, but unfortunately, when the tech guy set up the images, he cropped and resized and tweaked them in various ways…and I don’t have the modified images. I have my original files, but I can’t simply upload those — they won’t work.

So I guess I need a brand new banner. Anyone out there have any graphic artistry who’s willing to whip something up for me, in return for an acknowledgment, and a link on my About page? I can give you the old logo collection (that’s a .tar file of a set of Photoshop images), tell you that the size should be 760×120 pixels, and turn you loose. There is no obligation to use the old logos, and creativity is a good thing (I always felt the old banner never had enough tentacles, for instance); also, if you send me something, I’m not going to feel obligated to use it, or may even use it for a while and then replace it. So don’t agonize over it, or I’ll feel awful.

Thanks to everyone who has pointed me to caches of the old banners, but they also won’t work. The old banners were composites put together by putting images together with some randomizing code. I’m really thinking of a fresh start right now, a simple single banner.