Now you need not trust your terror information to cuddly cartoon characters or puppets... nor to snide armchair politicos! No indeed. Now you have the Geek Terror Alert Scale, treating the Department of Homeland Security Terror Alert Level with the seriousness it deserves:

Geek Terror

A full selection of iconic geeky beasts, fully representing the gravity of each possible terror level:

Remote Access: Paste this code into your page where you want the graphic to appear:

Local installation: download the script and graphics, upload the entire ALERT directory to your server, and use an image tag to call the script from your local server.

IMPORTANT! You MUST have the GD Library installed on your server to use this script locally. If you get an error similar to: 'The image http://www.yoursite.com/alert/geekterror.php cannot be displayed, because it contains errors' check and see if the GD library is available on your server:

"To generate images in real-time using PHP, we need to have the GD library installed. To make sure you have the GD library installed, create a new PHP page named checkgd.php in a directory on your web server. Enter the following code into checkgd.php:

<?php
phpinfo(INFO_MODULES);
?>

"Run the checkgd.php page on your web server. If you can find a section for the GD library (like in the sample shown here), then you have the GD library installed and ready to go.

"On the other hand, if you don't see a section for the GD library, then you will need to download and install the GD library." (Or email your host and ask them to install it ... but PHP modules can often be installed in your own local directory, and function just fine.)

... Thanks to developerfusion.com for the GD Library info!