Looking for someone to help me build an alert system

[Infernette]

Currently the only way my users receive alerts is through private messages, and what I am trying to design is a tab that a user can click at the top of the sidebar that switches over to the alerts "sidebar" when clicked(much like profile tabs work), and shows a display of the most recent alerts that the user has received(I know how to set this system up and make it process alerts for certain actions :3) My biggest problem is designing the tab and also show the count of "unread" alerts at the top by the name of the tab, and having the current(undismissed) alerts, with x's by them that the user can click to remove and dismiss them as read( I have no clue how to set the x to change the alert to read).

Any help would be appreciated and I can pay back in minor(and maybe a little messy) coding/art favors. :3

I can give more info and I am using 1.3.3, and would prefer if the code was posted in this thread for use for others. :3