Just curious, how fast in words per minute would you say you type?

I type between 120wpm and 130wpm depending on what I'm doing.

BTW, awhile back we were talking about these other skin sites that the "general community" doesn't go to. EZThemes and such. Those sites actually get a ton of visitors.

Well, I'm pleased to say that we have finally overtaken EZThemes in daily visitors.

Thanks to all your support!

DeviantArt is the world's largest on-line art community. They have recently begun allowing users to order prints of some of the great artwork available over there. Proceeds from the artwork go to the artists as well as to the site to help pay the bandwidth bills. Check it out.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~jbennett/nerd/n500test.html

What score do you get?

I got..well, let's just say I'm a nerd apparently.

Microsoft, AOL, and OEMs are at odds over what should be on the Windows XP desktop. Stardock has developed a solution that may solve the problem.

Just curious how many people downloading skins and such here have registered the program they're downloading skins for.

One of the things we've thought about to keep bandwidth use under control would be to look at someone who's downloading many megs of WindowBlinds skins and see if they've registered WindowBlinds or purchased Object Desktop and bring up a dialog nagging them or something.

Some people using the shareware version are of course just trying out skins but if they've downloaded 50 megs over the course of months, obviously they need to register it or stop using it (or at least stop using the bandwidth here).

Just curious as to what people here thought on that. Yea yea, the flames will start but Isuspect most of you register your software.

Stardock has released SkinStudio 1.1. SkinStudio is a program that lets you design your own custom interface to replace the drab UI of Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. The skins it produces can be used by WindowBlinds and ObjectBar to transform the Windows GUI. It's a free download, check it out.

Just curious, what speed are you connected to the Internet?

Have the recent changes at WinCustomize made the site seem faster?

Ever wonder what some of the graphics people at Stardock do when they're not making skins, icons, or themes? They make video games. Try out this cool new one!

Late last week we did a band width analysis to see where the bandwidth goes. Around 20% of it was spent on THUMBNAILS alone.

We made a change in which anonymous users would see the tiny thumbnails (we store 2 sizes of thumbnails - tiny and large) by default instead of the large ones. Sure enough, bandwidth use went down. We also made the change that the default would be the tiny thumbnails as well.

Now, let's say you want to have the larger thumbnails again, you need to have an account (accounts are free and take only 15 seconds to create) and then set your site optimization for DISPLAY rather than SPEED.

Today, we re-optimized the JPEG previews for display (rather than print). The result is that the thumbnails which used to be 30K on average are now falling to less than 10K even though they look the same. On a typical page with 10 previews, this will save nearly a minute of download time for modem users! Not all the thumbnails have been migrated yet but in the next day or so the process should be completed. Hope the site seems faster.