And even better…it didn’t break my blog.

Come to think of it, never mind. The theme is all about the design, and theme-ographer Evan Eckard makes that perfectly clear with massive, lush backgrounds and wild handwritten notes strewn about the page.

While Notepad Chaos isn’t breaking any new ground in a technical sense, it does wonders for those with a keen eye for design.

That’s why I’m showing you some of the best icon search engines on the internet. Whether you like to include icons with your blog posts or you’re just looking for a little something to spice up your desktop, these web apps should be right up your alley. Check them out, see if they offer what you want, and move on down the list if they don’t. And, in case you’re wondering, they’re in no particular order.

[For each site, I looked up two icons, one for Safari and another of a Dog. Some could find an image for both, some could only find one, and others couldn't find any--but your mileage may vary.]

1. Iconlook On first glance, Iconlook seems to be the most professional of the icon search engines. Glossy logo, big search field, it’s a regular web 2.0 site. Even when you search, you have plenty of options to check. Do you want big icons, small icons, or something in between?

However, Iconlook only found one icon for Safari (and it looked amazingly similar to the default icon) and only one icon for a Dog. Both were usable, but for a site that looks so promising, I would have expected more.

If you’re willing to browse, though, Iconlook gives you the option to check out all of the popular icons in a handy grid.

2. Iconfinder Iconfinder’s appearance is surprisingly similar to that of Iconlook. Big logo, big search field, grid layout for found icons. However, it lacks the selection feature to choose a particular icon size you need and it is missing a page filled with popular icons.

Also, searching for both Safari and Dog rendered nothing. In their defense, though, searches for more general topics like Drive, Computer, or Internet all came back with a fairly large number of results.

3. Iconlet Iconlet strays from the gaudy, glossy look of the previous two sites and goes for a more minimalist approach. While this is all well and good, their search feature can be annoying when you find multiple sizes for a particular icon–each size gets its own listing instead of simply combining multiple sizes and showing the largest. Not particularly user friendly.

Iconlet’s database is rather large, however, as a single search returns a number of results in multiple sizes. All icons are free, open source, or creative commons licensed. But, it wasn’t able to find a Safari icon–though it did find a couple of Dog icons.

4. SearchIcon SearchIcon is supposedly listing over 60,000 icons as of this writing, and I can totally believe it. The search engine feels stronger and more robust than some of the other contenders, and it really shows with the quality of results it returns.

SearchIcon also includes a handy feature that I’d like to see all of the other search engines incorporate. A path button which takes you to a page filled with related icons from the same series.

Searching for Safari came up with quite a few attractive results while the search for Dog churned out a handful of others (though no true picture of a dog).

5. Icons Search To be honest, I wasn’t too fond of the way Icons Search looked before I entered any search terms. It seems almost amateurish–but then again, so does Google.

The search feature itself, however, is fast and accurate, coming up with quite a few results for both Safari and Dog. Icons Search is also the only site thus far that 256×256 size icons. Really the only drawback here is the way the icons are displayed after a search. Much like Iconlet, there are multiple pictures of each icon depending on what sizes they come in.

6. The Icon Browser The Icon Browser is easily the most hastily put together of all of the icon search engines we’ve seen. It resembles an early web app from a decade or so ago. In a lot of cases, appearance can be deceiving–but that’s not entirely true here.

The search for Safari returned nothing while the search for Dog returned quite a few results, all of which were low quality, pixelated GIF files that look like clipart from the days of the Windows 3.1.

7. deviantART Last, but certainly not least, we have DeviantArt. Yes, I know it’s not a true icon search engine, though they do have a massive supply of amazing artwork that really blows the rest of the sites out of the water. Just type what icon you’re looking for then click on Customization followed by Icons on the left side of your screen.

Obviously, given the huge amount of art hosted on DeviantArt, finding a Safari icon and a Dog icon was a piece of cake.

So which of these search engines was the best? Search Icon is the clear winner as it totally outshines the rest of the true icon search engines. However, if you really want the highest quality content, you’re going to have to pay DeviantArt a visit.

If you need some sexy little icons for your site and you don’t want to blast your readers with over the top colors and wild designs, these are the icons for you. Simple, grey, and understated. They’re completely free and come in GIF format–so no browser issues to keep you down.

Go pick them up here.

To be quite honest, I was getting rather tired of seeing many Linux blogs all use the same default WordPress theme or a similarly unattractive design, so its nice to see a breath of fresh air in the Linux world–and hopefully Ubuntu WP will deliver it.

While the design won’t be winning any awards any time soon, it is certainly utilitarian, and focuses mostly on the content over wowing the visitors with snazzy effects and chic color choices. Nonetheless, if your readers are like any of the Linux users I know, you’ll have no problem getting them to read your blog so long as you provide them with plenty of function, or content in this case, over form.

And, to top it all off, Ubuntu WP packs in all the things that will make Ubuntu users rejoice. Stable, Widget Ready, HTML and CSS Valid, and totally Free.

I can honestly say I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a free WordPress theme that is specifically designed for the arts and crafts group. No, I’m not talking about the architectural movement nearly a century ago, but scrapbooking, sewing, and other such activities from the heartland. Floral Day comes across as a bit country, a bit shabby chic, a bit feminine–making it the perfect theme for those who blog about crafts, sewing, or any other similar hobby.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, thanks to a number of great sites to help you search through the millions of photos at Flickr (and other photo hosts) for one special shot that can make your great post into something truly memorable. Here are the six best tools to aid your image search.

1. Picitup. Picitup is an image searching machine that blows away other web focused searches like Google Images. You start by typing in a keyword that you’re looking for. Hit search and you’ve got hundreds of images at your fingertips.

But a bulky load of images is nothing if you can’t narrow the results down. A good place for bloggers like you and me to start is to switch the settings over to Flickr and select Creative Commons in the process. This gives you access to a ton of high quality (and not so high quality) images that are free to use so long as you attribute the original author.

Creative Commons sorting is not the only way to filter pictures on Picitup, however. You can even break your search results down by color, size, orientation, type of picture (person, advertisement, etc.), and even object shape. The shape search has some issues, but the rest of the settings work really well.

2. Compfight. Thanks to coverage by a number of big name sites, Compfight has generated a ton of buzz about it being the “best” Flickr search app. While it doesn’t have nearly as large of a scope as Picitup does, Compfight more than makes up for it with a friendly and easily accessible user interface.

Unlike so many image searches that don’t show a lot of pictures per page, Compfight breaks free by displaying loads of pictures at once. All it takes is a quick scroll through the first couple of pages to find just the picture you need.

Of course, as with all of the Flickr search apps, Compfight allows you to sort your results by Creative Commons licensing, as well as whether or not you can get the original straight from Flickr. Search can also be done through tags or all text, whichever floats your boat.

3. FlickrStorm. On first glance, FlickrStorm doesn’t look like much (especially in Safari). You type in a keyword and you’re given an assortment of images straight from Flickr with whatever type of licensing you need for your project. And it seems like that’s all this app does.

Then you click on a picture.

Boom, the image pops up right on the side of your search so you never have to leave the page. And it appears in your history to the left so you can compare shots as you go.

Perhaps the handiest feature on FlickrStorm, though, is the tray. Shift-Click on a thumbnail of your choice and that picture is added to the tray. When you’ve had enough photo searching for the day, just click on the save icon and you’re given a website with all of the pictures from your tray displayed in whatever size you want. Link to it, save it, download the pictures in bulk. Whatever you want to do.

4. PictureSandbox. Don’t let the amateurish design fool you. PictureSandbox is a hell of an image search with capabilities that span from Flickr to Webshots to Fotolia and more. Its a great tool if you’re looking for stock photos too–but there are better search apps out there for Flickr alone.

After a search, images are displayed in a similar fashion to Compfight, but not nearly as many per page. You can then click on the images to display a larger thumbnail and show some of the photo’s specs. Unfortunately, there’s no way to sort the images by license, size or anything else.

5. Creative Commons. Then there’s the tried and true Creative Commons site. They have a pretty handy Flickr search engine built into their web page that takes you directly to the Flickr site itself. Searching this way yields plenty of results, but it can take a while for you to find exactly what picture you want thanks to the limited amount of pictures per page. Also, every search from the Creative Commons site ensures that you get a picture with CC licensing, obviously.

6. Flickr. The last great way to search Flickr is to use Flickr’s built in search itself. You don’t get the hundreds of photos at your fingertips like you do with some of the earlier tools, but there are more than enough search options to please even the most diligent image searcher. Sort by camera, content type, licensing and more.

So which app do you use to search for post pictures? Did I forget to add your favorite to the list? Let me know in the comments.

As far as free themes go, you’re limited just to those which display one massive picture at a time–or something similar.

Now, however, you have a chance to display multiple pictures all at once in true gallery style. Inspired by the countless CSS galleries we see floating through the web, CSSEY is a theme designed for people who: 1. like free themes 2. like minimalist themes 3. want to show off their wares. And that’s it. If you can’t fit yourself into all three of these categories, CSSEY is not the theme for you.

Thanks to Best WordPress Themes for bringing this theme to the limelight.

You’ve heard me mention it before–the pain and suffering that goes into working with Internet Explorer 6. It just doesn’t follow the rules.

While layout problems are a major pain, one of my pet peeves is the lack of transparent PNG support in IE6. That’s what we’re here to talk about today–how to fix these problems in just a few seconds without having to do any code editing yourself.

For months (years), there have been quite a few different solutions out there on how to fix these PNG problems. Most of them revolve around inserting some JavaScript into your site’s head and changing the names of all of your PNG files. Unfortunately, a lot of these workarounds have been limited, unable to deal with outside the box PNGs, such as those which have been tiled or used as backgrounds, or so on and so forth.

With all of these setbacks, one solution has seemed to work the best–the Unit PNG Fix. It’s small, simple, and does the job really well. Certainly better than most. I’m using it on some of my other sites, but not this one–yet.

The only real problem remaining is that you actually have to edit your site’s code to ascertain the benefits of the PNG fix.

But those days are gone.

Thanks to the work of Vincenzo Russo, we now have a plugin (aptly named the WP-UnitPNGfix) that can do exactly what the Unit PNG Fix is capable of doing, without having to edit any code. It’s only for WordPress, but that’s better than nothing.

So, if you’re having trouble making that step to edit your own code, try installing this plugin instead. You’ll thank yourself later.

If you’re having a tough time finding the perfect RSS icon to entice your readers, look no further than this post over at the freshly redesigned Pro Blog Design. They’ve got a monster load of great icons for you to choose from.

Even if these 50 or so aren’t enough for you, check out their other post featuring 60+ RSS icons. Definitely worth checking out.