So where do you see the skinning community going?

I was doing a quick round up of the classic old sites and where are they now?

Skinz.org hasn't had a new news item since October 11th!

People aren't submitting news on Skinbase.org nearly as much as they used to.

Deskmod.com hasn't put their libraries up yet.

LotsOfSkins and ArtUproar seem to not be getting new news on them.

Customize.org seems to be doing well and deviantART is doing well.

If you haven't heard of these sites before, please check them out. They are all very good sites that deserve to be visited as well.

The classic WinCustomize.com was originally launched almost 4 years ago.  Hard to believe eh? And it's easy to forget that when it launched, it was pretty bare bones. The features that many users took for granted got added much later.  It is also easy to forget how slow the site tended to be at various times due to server or bandwidth overload.

The new site was necessary. Really it was.  I know some of you miss some of the goodies of the old site. Don't worry, they'll migrate back in time.  We'll shrink the editor size and we'll have buttons to take you back to top and buttons to list what your activity is without having to go to your personal page and countless other features.

And most of all, we'll be improving performance.  Performance is a tricky thing. It only takes one bug to slow down the site drastically. Take today for instance. Why was the site so slow? Why were there all those "server too busy" errors? One big reason: Every hit to the home page caused a very long query for figuring out the featured articles. A trivial thing seemingly and yet all by itself it brought the site to a crawl. That's why the articles are down tonight. We have to find a better way to display the articles.  We also found out that referral tracking was not cached. So we have that turned off tonight.

And there's tons of things like that lurking to be squashed.  The new site IS faster. You can tell sometimes when, just for a moment, it'll zip really fast. Then it'll dog down again due to whatever bug we haven't yet uncovered cropping up on one of the thousands of other users visiting the site.  You see that here in the forums. Forums are particularly tricky to optimize.  Cache too much and the data doesn't update as fast as people want. Don't cache the right areas and reading every post is very slow.

But consider the advances in this forum technology? Where almost every site uses invision power board where you have to go to every single forum (click click click) to find out what's going on, our forum works the opposite - the top most forums display the newest of all the sub-sections. If you want to go to a particular subsection just grab the sub-topic combo and go to the area you want to get more and more specific.

For example: I eventually could have a forum called OS Customization->WindowBlinds->Software for skin art->Photoshop->Techniques

The visitor to OS CUstomization->WindowBlinds gets to see everything that's new in all the sub-topics. But if it's too busy, they can get more and more specific and read up on it.  By contrast, on most sites using their BBS system, sub-forums simply die.  No one wants to keep clicking and clicking and clicking to get in there.

Moreover, we have bookmarks.  That's what the tabs are at the top of a forum area are.  They're just the highlighted sub-topics we've picked. With luck, someday we'll be able to make it so that users can make their own bookmarks for themselves.

We also are able to keep the global most recent responded to posts showing up on the left. By contrast, on other BBS system syou're back clickity click click back to look at the forums to try to see what the hot topics are.

So yes, some neat little features are still missing. They'll get in there.  But hopefully you can see the potential of the new forum system.  Once we get performance worked out, it'll be lightning fast and very convenient to use.  Just give us time.

I get a lot of email. I mean I really get a lot of email. Approximately 1,500 email per day.  Of that 1,500 about 1000 of it is spam (or at least filtered out as spam).  Of the remaining 500, about 200 of it is spam that didn't get caught leaving 300.  Of that 300 about half of it (200) I either don't need to respond to or can optionally respond to.

That leaves around 100 email per day that needs to be responded to.  At 3 minutes on average per email, that would be 5 hours per day of responding if I responded to all of them. I usually spend 3 hours per day on email. Which means quite a few emails that I should respond to just don't because there's not enoug h time.

Yesterday I wrote 73 emails. Average length was 50 words. Each one unique (i.e. none of these are "Canned" responses).  Today, because I got so busy, I've only written 44 emails. Which leaves me with around 450 emails I need to look over with some uniknown number needing a response (I would guess probably 100 of them). In fact, in the time I wrote this blog, I received 4 email. 3 were spam, 1 was legitimate (needing a response).

So Deadzombie has some ideas on how DesktopX should be done.  We're listening. 

First off, we've cleaned up the main UI. It's a lot easier to understand what DesktopX is about. 

Secondly, widgets are now much more configurable. We're only at the start of that journey that will go into future DesktopX versions as well. The feedback we're getting is pretty positive from beta testers so we hope this will put us on "the path".

Let us know what you think. If you have Object Desktop, you can get the latest version of DesktopX via Stardock Central. If you don't have it, get Object Desktop at http://www.objectdesktop.com or you can get DesktopX on its own at http://www.desktopx.net (only the reigstered version has been updated to the latest beta).

Hooking up a new site that gets millions of visitors each month is a challenge and boy are we being reminded of that.

So where are we?  Well, we're currently working through performance issues across the site. And so we're trying to narrow down ways of improving performance of the site overall.

We have lots of bandwidth. The problem boils down to servers (we need more), optimizing code, and optimizing the database. 

We apologize for performance issues, we're working very very hard to keep things rolling. Stay tuned..

It's been a bumpy launch so far.  This isn't just an update to the old site, it's a completely new site.

My biggest #1 priority is for us to get the site faster. MUCH faster. New features are likely going to have to wait until we get the site faster. But let us know what you think and what we need to work on the most in your opinon.

We've got a bunch of cool things in the works for ObjectDock and ObjectDock Plus.

Tell us what you'd like to see as well as any problems you're running into.

ObjectDock's home page it www.objectdock.com.

The new WinCustomize is here!

Bear with us as there will no doubt be issues that we have to work through over the next couple of weeks. But we hope you like what you see so far.

The new site is designed to be more steamlined for both new users and power users. It also has a lot more content than the previous site and provides a bunch of new ways for users to participate (with more ways to come).

Let us know what you think.  If you're running into performance issues, let us know. That's the part that's the trickiest to resolve since WC has so much traffic (millions of different users per month) that even one bug can cascade mightily.

Sorry for the lack of updates to the main page. I've been in New York this week on a media tour.  Meeting with a bunch of computer magazines to show them what we're doing with Object Desktop 2005 (www.objectdesktop.com).

But man the weather is awful here. Rainy, cold, miserable weather.

Meanwhile, back at the office they're trying to get the new Wincustomize going. Problem is, while the site runs fine with 200 people on at once, it bogs down when there's 3000 people at once. So they're struggling with that which no doubt is affecting the speed of JoeUser today.  When all this gets done, in theory all the sites should be faster.  We'll see.

So right now I'm in the lobby of the hotel preparing to go to today's next meeting. Trying to dry off after exploring some of Manhattan.  See you all soon.