Nowadays every second site you see employs some form or AJAX or the other - either wholly or in parts. With the old-school model of refreshing the whole page a visitor had always had a clear-cut indication that he/she is supposed to wait till the page-load is complete. That's one respect AJAX seriously lacks in. In short there's no way for the user to know if the application is actually performing some task in the background or simply stuck infinitely. Hence, with AJAX based sites, you've to manually implement some sort of visual indicator that tells the viewer to wait for a while till the processing gets completed.

For totally minimalistic interfaces like GMail, a simple "Loading…" message does the job. But if you're one of those who want to provide some eye-candy action to your visitors to keep them amused, you need to implement one of those fancy animated loading indicators that's become a common sight in many sites these days. Under such circumstances, you've two viable options:

1. Take up the tedious job of actually creating one using one of the standard graphics editing + animation package combo.
2. Rip it off some other site

If you're artistically challenged like me, the first option is entirely out of question. The second one is the easier way out. However, it presents you with a potential problem - the colour palette (specially the background) might not match with yours, thus rendering it in form of an ugly block.

If you're wondering as to what's your "easy" way out here, no need to think too hard. Ajaxload.info is a brand new free service that does the same for you for free. Ajaxload itself it a AJAX based site with a simple interface that consists of a dropdown box with a pretty sizeable list of such animated indicators. Apart from that there are colour palette selection boxes through which you can specify the background & foreground colours of the indicator. Once you're done with configuring, just hit Generate and your customised indicator appears in the Preview window, ready for download.