Many frustrating searches on Google later, I found a veritable garden of animated delights-Millan.net and managed to make my blog look more like an
online zoo, with little animated animals running hither tither, in yoga poses, and Zen fountains sprouting from the sidebar. It wasn't just me, whoever I recommended Millan.net too couldn't resist going overboard, as this website contains more than 10,000 animations, in a number of categories and subcategories ranging from animals (cats, dogs, birds, cows and bugs), occupations, computers and love. If you're the minimalist kind, Flashiness also offers free flash animations such as banners and advertisements for your website.

In my opinion, the best way to get animations and movies is to search on topics that interest you, or are the subject of your blog posts. For example, a random  search on political cartoons led me to the
website of cartoonist Mark Fiore, who has
an extremely funny collection of Flash-
based political cartoons up on his website.
Another interesting website is Corbis,
which has a collection of QuickTime movie
clips which can be downloaded in high and
low resolution versions.

After being scared out of my wits by a German advertisement for an energy drink which shows an ogre-like figure suddenly popping out after a minute of a car driving smoothly down a hillside complete with soothing music, (which also caused two people to scream out loud in my university lab), I started looking for similar advertisements for a school project and came across Chasem (www.chasem.net), which has an interesting collection of advertisements and animations procured from websites like Angry Alien and Albino Black Sheep.

If nothing strikes your fancy on the internet, the miracle of pirated software can make you a designer (I do not guarantee how good you'll be) literally overnight. Grab a CD with Adobe Photoshop/Swish/Flash software and a couple of online tutorials later, you are very well equipped to make your own animated clips and cartoons to truly personalize your blog or website. You can also clip out scenes from your favorite songs and movies and make small sized clips out of it-e trend that I've seen become popular on many Pakistani music discussion forums.

Of course, the more the animation/movies, the longer it will take for your website to load -hence remember not to go overboard, and do keep the bandwidths of your visitors in mind.