It happened quietly, but 365 Halloween celebrated its first birthday this month. As with any labor of love, it’s almost hard to imagine a time when this site hasn’t been a part of our lives. When we’re not actively blogging or posting tutorials then we’re planning new website features, collaborating with other Halloweenies, tweaking code, or designing a new layout. All year long. It may sometimes look a little sleepy around here, but we’re always planning new and awesome things for our fellow Halloween lovers!

If you haven’t visited 365 Halloween in a while then you’ll notice our brand new look. Dig around a little more and you’ll see new features like;

Listing of the most popular posts (automatically updated)
RSS feeds for each blog category
Free Halloween Countdown widgets for your website
Improved navigation and layout for easier browsing
RSS feeds for individual tags

Next week we will also debut;

new …

Here are some free Halloween countdowns that you can add to your website. Just click the “get & share” button to get the code.

Show the world your year-round love of Halloween by adding a Halloween banner to your website. Either use the ImageShack-hosted codes below or save the images to your server.

234×60…

Congratulations, Halloweenies: you’ve made it to the 99 day mark in the 2007 countdown to Halloween. Like your high school woodshop teacher, we’ve just unceremoniously dropped a digit, but in this case it’s cause for celebration. Just 3-ish more months until everything comes in shades of orange and black, scary movies are playing on every channel, and you can finally shed your 9-to-5 gear for that badass costume you’ve been working on for weeks. Good times!

We’ve been planning for the 2007 all year, and are getting really close to unveiling our new site design and this year’s theme as well as a casketful of articles. If you’d like to be alerted when we unearth everything, just subscribe to our feed. Also, 365 Halloween just moved over to a new server in preparation for everything, so if you see any broken stuff …

The next 3 days or so is the final rush for online Halloween shopping, so retailers are offering some good deals. Costumes are flying off the shelves too, so if you don’t have your costume yet then you need to either buy RIGHT NOW or plan to wear a DIY get-up. I did some online shopping this morning and had an eerily perfect experience, but I’ll save the details for after the deals and coupons below. Some of them expire this weekend, so don’t wait!

Extremely Time-Sensitive Deals

Fright Catalog: Same day shipping on most orders placed by Noon EST. Variable shipping costs. Place an order of $50 or more TODAY (October 21st, 2006) and receive 2 R.I.P. Rewards cards worth $10 each for future purchases of $40 or more (details here).
Buy Costumes: $0.99 FedEx Ground shipping and $5.99 FedEx …

Looking for more original horror t-shirts to add to your collection? Fright-Rags has a good selection of well designed horror shirts of your favorite cult classics, creature features and slasher movies. These shirts are exclusive to Fright-Rags so you can’t get them anywhere else.

Being a huge zombie fan, I was initially drawn to the Obey (zombies make great social commentary) and Johnny shirt that says the classic line “They’re coming to get you Barbara!” Oh how right Johnny was. I also admire the simplicity of design on everyone’s cult favorite Ash (from Evil Dead), and Frankenstein.

I’m also …

If you haven’t already, it’s time to start carving pumpkins. If you’ve already carved one up, it’s time to get a new one because it’s probably not as good as a Zombie Pumpkin. Each stencil is hand drawn and stylized by Ryan, the one man show, to work perfectly with traditional cut-out carving techniques. You don’t need to be a master carver for these stencils to come out looking good. But I’ll stop gushing over how awesome they are and let you get to choosing. The site’s been recently updated for the 2006 season with a new design and new stencils. Some of the newest are Stubbs the Zombie (personal fav), Head Cheerleader, Gizmo (from the 80’s flick Gremlins), and in honor of Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees.

Don’t forget that the stencils can be used for other …