Call me mad, but your favourite web geek advent calendar is back for a second season at 24ways.org. The idea is that we post a new web design/development article every day from the 1st December all the way up to Christmas. Last year was tough work but well worth it as all the articles were very well received.

I can’t promise we’ll top the success of last year, but at the very least we’ll try to match it. I’ve got a great line-up of authors all ready to go, including some familiar names from last year as well as some fresh contributors. I’ll not spoil the surprise – you’re going to have to check back each day and see what we’ve got in store.

To kick the proceedings off today, I’ve opened with an article on building a widget like Safari RSS’s article length slider. This enables the user to dynamically adjust the length of text shown on the page. I’ve called it the Tasty Text Trimmer for want of a better name. Feel free to check it out and grab our feed to keep tabs on the articles thoughout the rest of the month.

All of last year’s articles are available at a new home (with suitable redirects in place – nothing should be broken).

Now if only the damn Gravatar server would remain stable. I’m convinced more and more that we need to move away from centralised network services like this. What a disaster.