How to: create a helper (newbie)

[eluser]epseix[/eluser]
I have a number of social networking links (about 5) in the footer of my site and I need to generate data for each of the anchor link's TITLE and URL - and ICON (image).

It's not really worth creating a new table for only 5 rows, so I'm thinking a helper might be a the answer - some sort of associative array.

However, I'm a bit unsure how to construct the helper's array - and completely clueless as to how to loop the results in the view file.

Any help, or any links to useful examples, is greatly appreciated!