LiveJournal, the blogging site, has been bought up by Six Apart, the company behind the MovableType weblog software. The buy-out will see staff working with Danga, the company which previously owned LiveJournal, move to San Francisco to work with the new owners.

LiveJournal's creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, said the move will mean "nothing earth-shattering" for the existing service. However, users are to get access to trackback for the first time. "They're not buying the site to spam you, screw you, destroy the community, or convert you en masse to their other paid services," Fitzpatrick said. "They just want to double our efforts and have a part in all types of blogging. "

Six Apart CEO, Barak Berkowitz, added: "We are now the only company to offer the full range of weblogging tools to the market," he said. "We welcome LiveJournal users to the Six Apart family, and promise to keep the LiveJournal culture and quality which has earned their devotion."

Fitzpatrick promised development of LiveJournal will continue after the move; prices would not rise and free accounts would not be scrapped, he said. Since it started up five years ago, LiveJournal has built up a community of over five million users - it currently claims to have just short of 2.5 million actively-updated blogs on its servers.

Hat Tip: www.neowin.net

Here is the rough draft of some of our favorite skins of 2004. If there's something you think we've overlooked (And there were lots of great skins last year and I hate not mentioning the dozens of great skins people made last year but these are basically some of the favorites in the office here at Stardock):

Skinning, the art of changing the look and feel of your computer programs.  Many popular programs can be skinned - Windows Media Player, Winamp, and using programs like WindowBlinds, all nearly all your programs become skinnable! And 2004 was a great year for skinning.  Now what you think is a great skin and what we think are great skins probably differ. Some people like incredibly minimalistic skins that focus purely on functionality. Others like skins that really go against the flow.

What we try to celebrate is the diversity that skinning brings to the table. The whole point of skinning is that we all have different tastes. People spend a great deal of time worrying about what their cars look like. So it stands to reason why millions of people around the world, who spend hours a day in front of a computer, might want to have the programs they use have a particular look and feel.

No doubt that we missed some truly remarkable skins last year.  Over a thousand WindowBlinds skins were created last year. A similar number of Winamp skins were created last year in various forms and hundreds of Media Player skins came out.  There are also skins in all kinds of formats ranging from NextSTART to Astonshell to msstyles.  To keep things in line, we're focusing on what is on WinCustomize.com, the world's largest, most popular dedicated skin site in the world. If you have a favorite program that WinCustomize.com doesn't have, let us know.

So let's take a look at some of the highlights of 2004!

And so we start here, with the default Windows interface...

Blue Luna, the standard look of Windows with its icons.

Skin of Note:  Alienware ALX Vortex Designer: The Skins Factory Comments: This skin was designed for Alienware and was one of the most popular skins on the net this past year. The screenshot I show here doesn't really give it justice as the animation effects of the actual skin are outstanding. It requires Windows Media Player 9 or later (I'm using 10 here).

 

Skin of Note: DogmaX Designer: Brewman Comments: This skin totally dominated much of the late summer early Fall time frame. It's clean design and completeness helped it. Pictured here is just the WindowBlinds visual style but this is just one part of a greater suite.

 

Skin of Note: D-Relection Designer: Kriptoner Comments: This is another skin that a screenshot can't do justice on. Ths is the type of skin that is so well done that it should arguably be the default skin of Winamp in my opinion.  It's too bad you can't use this skin with Winamp Lite because this skin really does demonstrate why Winamp is still such a good media player.

Skin of Note: ThunderStorm Designer: Pixtudio Comments: Pixtudio's ThunderStorm skin remained popular long after the GUI Olympics was over. Its completeness and overall polish made it a favorite amongst users everywhere.

Skin of Note: WooHoo-FER Designer: VGA-MetaSkins Comments: This was one of the GUI Olympics skins that was quite popular for its artistic design. It's not quite as "usable" as D-Reliction but in terms of skinning it shows the maturity of the artform. One of the nice touches is that as the music plays, the two speakers vibrate.

 

Skin of Note: Opulence Designer: b0se Comments: One of the cleaner looking skins of the GUI Olympics also remained very popular after the fact. In terms of clean usable skins this was one of the most best of the year.

 

Skin of Note: Fabre Designer: Gabriel Comments: While there are vocal people out there who seem to freak out if a skin isn't as minimalist as possible, there are millions of others who like to dress up Windows with cool and original looking skins.  Fabre is one of those skins that has to be run to really be appreciated. It's really fantastic, especially if you run at higher resolutions.

 

Skin of Note: WooHoo-FER Designer: Andrew Mackowski Comments: This too was one of the GUI Olympics skins and it was incredibly original and very useful.  It was for these kinds of skins that it was worth having the GUI Olympics in the first place IMO.

 

Skin of Note: Gizmo Designer: MikeB Comments: No one is going to accuse this skin of being usable on a production machine (with the title bar being on the bottom and the buttons spread out).  But man it looks cool. I love the Start bar in particular.

 

Skin of Note: Halo 2 Skin for WMP10 Designer: The Skins Factory Comments: This is another one of those skins where screenshots don't do them justice. Many of the best skins end up like that - where the coolness is in the little touches. This is another skin from The Skins Factory.

 

Skin of Note: Catwoman Designer: The Skins Factory Comments: It was an awful movie but man it made a good skin. Lest someone think I have some "thing" for The Skins Factory let's just face the facts - they dominated their area of skinning last year. Fans of Windows Media Player should be thankful that these guys are getting these skins made. That isn't to say that there aren't plenty of fine Windows Media Player skins, but the gulf in polish between those and these is pretty immense.  Of course, one might argue that because The Skins Factory is a professional design studio it should have "better" skins. But to the end user, downloading them, they're just as free as anyone else's.

Skin of Note: Jester Designer: Essorant Comments: This is one of those skins that is useful and grows on you over time. I don't use it in its default color but rather change the hue of it (using WindowBlinds 4.5) and turn down the saturation to make it somewhat more subdued.  But it's very usable and easy on the eyes over the course of the day.

 

Skin of Note: VectorCell Designer: b0se Comments: I suspect if there was an overall vote by all USERS of skins for 2004 this would be the skin most people would be willing to agree on was the best skin of 2004. Not because it was the most complete, it wasn't. Not because it was the most creative, it wasn't.  And not because it was the most minimal, it wasn't. But because it had that certain something, it was creative enough combined with simple enough it was really quite remarkable how unique this skin was. It's so usable and so easily modifiable that it does with almost anything. In some ways, one might argue that this is the visual style that some innovative OS developer would have as its default UI. That isn't to imply that it is "better" than all the others. That's all a matter of taste. But it was definitely one of the highlights of 2004.

 

Skin of Note: Synthek Designer: danillo0c Comments: On IRC I have seen some people describe danillo0c as perhaps being the next Treetog.  And not just because he's from Brazil too. Synthek is really just the tip of the iceberg in a year of fantastic skins from danillo0c. They're highly creative and artistic. If you click on the designer's link, you can go to his personal page on WC and see that Synthek is actually part of a greater suite of skins. It's quite outstanding.

 

Skin of Note: GT3 Designer: Tiggz Comments: Tiggz is multi-talented as a skinner. For old timers who lament the passing of classic skinners should keep an eye on the fact that skinners like Tiggz are rising stars in the skinning community. GT3 is a WindowBlinds skin. But Tiggz is the #2 DesktopX widget maker, the #2 Rainlendar skinner, a leader in the wallpaper and ObjectDock groups, and in the top 30 icon designers. He does it all.

 

So there you have it. Some of the highlights in skinning from 2004.  

I'm involved in a lot of virtual communities on-line.  And one of the trends I see regularly is, if someone knows what you do for a living, inevitably they'll twist what you say to fit some sort of stereotype of the evil capitalist.

For instance, if I'm on a skin site and I say "I like your Litestep theme" it's only a matter of time before someone says "Oh you're just trying to trick him into letting you make a WindowBlinds version! Can't you ever stop trying to sell your stuff?"  Because yea, at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon that's what I'm doing, I'm scouring through websites trying to corrupt the youth to make a little extra money so that I can pay for my private yet. Sheesh.

Sometimes I'd like to give them a taste of their own medicine. Find out what they do for a living.."So, you work at a book store eh? So when you posted how you liked that new Star Wars game you were really just trying to suck us into your lame book store to buys some crummy Star Wars books! Can't you give it a rest! Everyone knows that fan fiction is better anyway and it's free! Die capitalist pig!"

Few times is this trend brought into relief more than what I saw today.  On a website discussing whether it's "legal" to create and use msstyles (an unsupported Microsoft skin format) I wrote:

MSStyles aren't illegal IMO.

However, they ARE derivatives of Luna.msstyles which is a copyrighted file.

So if I took, for instance, the Windows XP kernal, changed some bits and re-distributed it, is that legal? I'm not sure. That's how a lot of boot screens ARE distributed btw.

But the whole premise of this topic I think is problematic - is it illegal? Who's to say. Microsoft has had 3 years to weigh in. We do know they don't approve of msstyles being used by third parties but that's a far cry from them going after third parties who use them or create software that use them.

My personal opinion is that what you do on your own computer is your business.

Amazingly, someone read this and responded with the following (and bear in mind that this is on the same page as my response):

Frogboy... ,you shouldn't try to take an underground comunity like this as professional as you wanted, if everything was right, and about legal stuff like some foreigners see the US when a kid sues for a mosquito that was copyrighted and bit an apple in his backyard, maybe you wouldnt even have born.

When stuff like this happens on Capitalism Societies, it makes me wonder why doesnt the "Benefit for yourself without hurting" and the "Bigger Animal Dominates" societies persisted

And it so lame how even FROGBOY ported a inspirat skin that was an "illegal file" at first to windowblinds, and submitted by himself to a monopolized website full of old people ;[

And I dont hate frogboy itself, I hate the way he thinks about stuff sometimes to "conquer" the world

So apparently, when I say that I don't think msstyles are illegal what I'm really saying that they ARE illegal and that you should go out and buy WindowBlinds right now. And when I say what people do on their own computers is their own business what I really mean is that I want to control what you do on your computer as part of my latest Pinky & the Brain style world conquest strategy.

And sadly, this happens regularly.  As soon as someone figures out that I write software for a living, it's almost inevitable that everything I say will get warped by someone into some 2D characterture of what they imagine some evil capitalist is saying.  My words end up being like adult-speak on a Charlie Brown cartoon and replaced with lots of evil laughter and hand rubbing.

I guess I should be thankful that I didn't put a Donate to Tsunami victims post up somewhere lest someone accuse me of wanting to harvest the organs of Tsunami victims or something!

So how are we doing? Let's take a look at the new WinCustomize and the old WinCustomize side by side. here's what they looked like to the typical user.

The new site doesn't have the theme system in yet (allowing users to customize the look and feel of the site). It's in the work queue but it won't be ready for a bit. Lots of little features and bugs and glitches to work out first. So what I'm looking at is how much information is conveyed in both while at the same time how complicated or how simple are these designs?

Let's put them directly side by side:

On the new site, you can see about half of the skin galleries.  On the old site, you could only see the top 4.  On the new site, you can see the top 5 skins. On the old site, you could see the top 9 without scrolling.  On the new site the featured skin and screenshot are together in one area.  On the old site they were separated.  On both sides you can see the featured premium suite but the new site also lets you see the featured articles on the page.  Both have a banner ad at the top if you're not logged in and both have a randomly selected item from the store.  The new site doesn't have a sponsor button at the top - it's been moved to the bottom.

I personally preferred the old logo. I think we'll have to find a way to work that one back into the site. If anyone wants to volunteer to try to put together the old logo feel free. I think there's a version of it in the shirts area of the graphics gallery here.

What we have tried to do is have a site that is much cleaner and more easily understandable by new users while at the same time vastly increasing the amount of "stuff" that one might get to. The tabs are a big part of that and having a lot of the key data available on the home page without having to scroll down.

So what do you think? Do you like the direction the new launch has taken so far?

In the good old days we used Hitbox to measure WinCustomize.com's traffic. And it was good. But then one day they stopped providing it for free and in fact made it bloody difficult to even pay for the service.  Which is ironic because we would be willing to pay for a reliable, accurate and reasonably detailed site traffic monitoring service (withing reason).

But everyone we try out seems insist on us contacting some sales guy. Um no, I want to enter in a company credit card number, enter the monthly service plan choice and have some HTML provided to put it on the site. But oh well. So we found Site Meter.

Site Meter gives us results that we like but we're not sure how accurate they are. Hitbox used to report that we got around 70,000 unique visitors per day and that came out to being around 1 point something million per month when they discontinued the service over a year ago. Siter Meter, by contrast, claims we get around 500,000 visitors per day.  But that's not "unique" visitors. 

And that's okay. All we're interested in knowing is whether overall traffic is good or bad on a given day relative to other days.  Which is where Sitemeter has been giving us problems this week.  Our peek hours are between 9am and 4pm EST.  But in the past 3 days, according to SiteMeter, traffic just collapses between those hours and then picks up later in the day (if you're looking at the graph, the part of the day we haven't been to is 0, just know that hours 9 through 16 should be the peek hours). 

It's as if the system freaks out at having that many hits and shuts down or something.  Which is annoying.  We noticed that the page hits it records stays the same and what it instead says is that the average visit time on WC is 20 minutes which is absurd. It's more like 5 minutes for the average user (yes, plenty of people spend hours on the site but that's not the norm when you're talking about tens of thousands of people on in a given hour).  So during our peek hours, our hourly visitor level according to SiteMeter drops from 25,000 visitors at 8am to under 9,000 by 2pm).  That makes no sense at all.

Our first concern was that maybe WinCustomize basically crashes for most people when the site gets really busy.  That it gets overloaded and nobody is actually able to do anything and so the hit counter isn't being accessed.  But on our IRC channel (irc.stardock.com #stardock) I asked there and no one had any problems at all. So that's not it.

Late this afternoon we took the Sitemeter counter off one of the servers to see what affect that would have.  None. Which makes us more suspicious that perhaps WC's traffic reaches a level that Sitemeter can't handle it.  I'm not aware of any sites as popular as WC that uses Site Meter. The only site I know of that's quite popular that uses it is Instapundit which isn't anywhere near the same level (very popular for a blog site of course). 

My personal theory is that maybe Site Meter gets overflow errors if the page view count exceeds 32,535.  I say that because even as traffic plummets during the day (according to the graph) the page view counter seems to max out at around 32,500. And when the peek time passes, the page views stays still very high but miraculously, the visitors per hour jumps back up (18,000 last hour and that's with the site meter button only on one server).

Anywya, I wonder if anyone else has run into this sort of thing?

You can now purchase and download The Political Machine from Stardock! 

We are also working on version 1.1 of The Political Machine with updates to various campaign issues, new candidates, and more! We expect to have that out in the next couple of weeks. It will be a free update for all players of The Political Machine.

To purchase and download the game immediate go here: https://www.politicalmachine.com/purchase.asp

Check out this demo of Avalon and XAML working together. Avalon in a technology that will be in the next version of Windows but will also be back ported to Windows XP. It let's users create all kinds of visually enticing interfaces using scripts and able to access 3D graphics hardware.

DesktopX will eventually make use of XAML & Avalon under the covers to make doing this stuff even easier.

Over as CES Linksys will be announcing a new series of 802.11g products that integrate SRX, a new speed boosting feature.

Currently, 802.11g networks have a range of between 120 and 160 feet and a transfer at 54mbps.

Linksys claims that the SRX enabled 802.11g products can provide 3 times the range (450 feet) and is 8 times faster (i.e. nearly USB 2 speed wireless).

It's completely compatible with other 802.11g and 802.11b networks.

The wireless router is expected to sell for $199 and each card around $129 and should be available at stores shortly.

Amazon.com is running a donation system on its home page to provide aid to tsunami victims. Since it has pages in different countries, you can see how well it does per country.

USA: http://www.amazon.com/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/PX3BEL97U9A4I/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $13,910,657.00

Number of donations: 171,710

Population of USA: 293,027,571

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0475

Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/

http://s1.amazon.com/paypage/P1K4EVLBRBZ771/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $62,579.82

Number of donations: 1,023

Population of Canada: 32,507,874

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0019

United Kingdom: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3RDR40PV9HS5E/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $391,910.39

Number of donations: 7,611

Population of United Kingdom: 60,270,708

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0065

Germany: http://www.amazon.de/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3USRMAJ8GVL0F/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $170,477.00

Number of donations: 3,427

Population of Germany: 82,424,609

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0021

France: http://www.amazon.fr/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/PMS8ISE6626LD/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $29,161.50

Number of donations: 795

Population of France: 60,424,213

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0005

Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/my-pay-page/P3C9345RXUJQOM/104-4679654-9766331

Total collected: $87,818.00

Number of donations: 2,488

Population of Japan: 127,333,002

Approximate per capita donation to RC thru Amazon: $0.0007

I don't find the numbers as compelling as you might think. For instance, perhaps people from Germany or France go to amazon.com instead? Or perhaps the number of Internet accounts in those countries is fewer? We don't know. 

What we can, however, conclude is that anyone harping on how much GOVERNMENTS are providing to aid other countries is only part of the story.

The US government may have "only" provided $350M (so far) to help victims of the tsunami, that's a drop in the bucket compared to private organizations.

A more fair measurement of how "stingy" different countries are would be to look at their GDP and then look at what % of the GDP the government confiscates for itself.  The US government confiscates something like 25% of the GDP of its citizens compared to twice or more in some European countries.

Then add the cost of military expenses in here.  Sweden, for instance, is giving a lot of money for its size. Great for them. However, how is that aid actually getting there? At the end of the day, someone actually has to take that money, buy supplies with it, transport it to the region and deliver it to people. And guess how that's being done? The US military.

People were wrong about the US being the world's police. It's also the world's fire department.