Recipe for your Twitter background picture stew (downloads)

Update 12/03/2013: Updated to correct a couple of errors including a new download link

So, I've spent my evening messing about with Photoshop to create one of those personalised Twitter background pictures that includes URLs for my other social media profiles, the result is the picture above. They seem popular, although I'm not sure of their value, but in any case I thought it was worth sorting mine out (just in case).

Anyway, if you're interested, here's how I did it.

Ingredients:

• Get some lovely pictures - I'm not saying that my profile picture fits that bill, but I do like my main background picture.
• Get Photoshop - If you don't already have it and are as skint as I am, you can download CS2 for free here: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

Method:

1. Create a new Photoshop document. I went for 1800 x 1024 pixels at 300 ppi (To ensure I avoided any ugly tiling - It probably needn't have been as wide)
2. Paste in your lovely background picture, resize and move until you are happy with what's on show.
3. Work out how much space your Twitter feed will take up, and insert a rectangle to the left that's about 194 pixels wide.  Using my rudimentary Photoshop knowledge I inserted a black rounded rectangle and then rubbed that out with a 50% opacity eraser, leaving a semi-transparent shape. 
4. On top of that, paste in a picture of yourself, and any links you'd like to include.
5. If you're lucky, you're good to go. When you upload the image to Twitter, make sure you centre align it.

If all that sounds like too much of a faff, don't worry, I have some useful links:

• My PSD files as a starter for your background (don't forget to edit these, otherwise you'll just be plugging my links, my ugly mug, and my beautiful background picture): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8aqNunuvPk-bm9SanlaOEo2R2s/edit?usp=sharing
• In case you missed it earlier, you can download the Adobe Creative Suite 2, including Photoshop, (completely legally) from here: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html (Gimp is also a good option: http://www.gimp.org/)

Notes:

• I'm not convinced many people actually use twitter.com to tweet anymore, but it can't hurt to have a personalised background anyway
• I have yet to test this background on various screen-sizes / resolutions, if it proves to be unsuitable, I'll edit the files in the download to a format that works better

Additional Notes

The dimensions above don't quite work at the moment, will update when I have better dimensions fixed :)