IconPackager was first released in 1998.  It wasn't put onto Download.com until much later.  In hindsight, what IconPackager does seems obvious it lets you change all your icons at once by applying packages.

MS Themes could change something like 7 icons on your desktop.  A good IconPackager theme, by contrast, can change over 120 icons giving you a consistent look to it.

While clones of IconPackager have come out over the years, IconPackager has remained the leader through steady improvements, more icon support, and early support for new icons in the OS.

Today is passed the 2 million download mark making it one of the most popular downloadable programs of all time.

JoeUser.com hasn't "officially" launched yet. We're still technically in beta (i.e. we haven't done any promotion).  Our Alexa ranking is around 25,000. Sometimes it shoots up when something written here gets particular attention but generally it hovers around 25,000.  We don't have a good traffic monitoring system on yet.  We do, however, know how many people are on at once and that number typically hovers around 200 to 300 depending on the time of day.

In the link (shown at bottom), John puts forth the simple rule of blog success: You have to keep at it for a long time.  Years.  And like me, he's faced frustration at not getting his articles linked to by the "elite" blogging sites such as Instapundit. Sometimes it does but it's few and far between. A handful of blog sites really have almost all the traffic with the rest scraping for the last bits.

That was what inspired JoeUser in the first place. I got frustrated with writing something that I thought was "good" (Relatively speaking, I'm barely literate <g>) only to have it just die off in the ether.  But if we could build a community of bloggers where we promote each other. Then it works out much better.  I think it's safe to say that the typical blogger here gets vastly (100X) more readers than they would on their own.  And together we are able to skip years of grinding effort to get noticed.  I have Right Wing News's website shown above precisely to make that point: In about a year, we've already passed it in daily traffic. 

While we have the readers, and by we I mean all of us combined, we don't yet have the respect.  We rarely get mentioned in blog round ups still. Hopefully that will change when the site is launched and the marketing people start doing their thing.  But for now, we're on our own to carve our own success  based on the quality of our collective writing abilities.

So keep at it, and you will build your own base of readers for your blog. JoeUser's unique system jump starts that base but it still takes effort and more importantly, persistence over a long period of time.

Here's a good fisking of Fisk.

http://www.nicedoggie.net/archives/004502.html

Meanwhile, another fisking of a leftwing journalist who seems to be obsessed with "world jewry" (I tell ya, there are a lot of leftists who seem paranoid about what Jewish people are doing).

http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/007276.php

Okay, only those two.  I'm just playing around with Blog Nav pro tonight.

It's really odd having a turtle that is older than you.  Cuddles, the family turtle, is around 50 years old now. I got him when I was a teenager and here, now at 33, we still have him.

I've read that box turtles can live a century, so who knows, my kids may one day be fighting over Cuddles.

One of the things that probably annoys some users of JoeUser (bloggers in particular) is the syndication of other articles and forum posts into their blog. 

Why did we do that?

the goal of JoeUser is very egaltarian.

When I'd set up JoeUser as my personal blog I saw the pros and cons of blogging it alone.  As it got more popular, I became aware of a barrier to entry into the wider world. Basically, my blog was at the mercy of an established order of elite blogs. It bugged me that even if I wrote something of high quality (IMO of course) that I was at their mercy as to whether they would choose to link to me or not.

Most bloggers out there have very very few readers. So when I decided to open up Joeuser to the public, we came up with a system: Have new articles show up on all sites so that readers of one would be inclinded to go to others.

This has the negative side effects you described. Our plan though is that users will be able to buy premium accounts this Fall, which amongst other things, will give htem greater control over their blog.

Ultimately though, the concept of Joeuser revolves around the premise that most bloggers get few readers and provides a system to rectify that.

I'm pretty jazzed but I think we're getting close to where you'll be able to start posting articles via blog nav pro.  Which is much fatser than going through the web interface.

It's about to go gold and be released to the public this month.

Microsoft will finalize the code for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) sometime today, release it via Microsoft Download Center and MSDN on the Web tomorrow, and then ship it to customers via Windows Update beginning August 25, though Automatic Update users will get it immediately on a staggered basis.

For those users running software that patches their system DLLs or hacks their kernal, expect a wild ride. In most cases new versions of those various patches will have to be applied. 

And For those of you using say WindowBlinds or DesktopX or IconPackager (i.e. Object Desktop programs) SP2 should work fine with no updates required.

We'll keep you up to date on what problems we hear in various customization programs so that you're prepared.

I'm really frustrated with the 4 year old.  We have two children, a 7 year old and a 4 year old.  They couldn't be more different.  Both have traits that make them very lovable. But the 4 year old has been a real challenge to raise so far.

The 7 year old is kind, gentle, and full of empathy.  The 4 year old, to put it mildly, is not.  He's cute and has his moments of sweetness.  But he will also seemingly go out of his way to break things.

This morning he came up on Alex's toy insect collection and simply broke off the legs on some of them.  No reason. He just did it.  Alex was devastated.  He's the kind of kid who takes very good care of his things.  He also readily shares his things with others, seemingly unaware that not everyone is like he is in their treatment of personal things.

When we had only 1 child, my wife and I credited Alex's nature to our parenting.  But the 4 year old, Ryan, shows us that nature conquers nurture in many respects.   It's not that Ryan isn't a sweet little boy. He is. I love him to pieces.  And he is a lot better than many of the children his age that we're around.  Ryan doesn't have a cruel bone in his body for instance.  He's got a kind heart.  But he just seems to inclined to destroy things.  I like to think that he just wants to take things apart to see how they are made.  I'm not sure yet.  I only know what the end result is - the ruining of a cherished toy or object of someone else.

So he's in his room (I'm working from home today). And the 7 year old has that "I'm trying to keep a brave face on" but looks incredibly sad.