Dangeruss's Liquid 2 skin became the first skin on WinCustomize to reach over 100,000 downloads!

Congratulations to Dangeruss!

I've been visiting Skinbase quite a bit lately slowly uploading some of my stuff there.

And it hit me, the problem new sites have, especially right now, is that because it's so time consuming to upload skins and because no one can be sure how long many of these sites wil be around that many skin authors (myself included) fear that the hours we're spending uploading is going to go to waste if the site goes down.

I think one of the reasons why WinCustomize has done well in the skins area since it launched is because skin authors know it's not going to go away thus it's worth taking the time.

So how do we make it easier to upload skins to multiple sites? I was thinking it could be solved through software:

A program in which you type in your logon info to various sites and it would log you on and you could mass submit skins to all the sites at once. So when you're uploading that Litetep theme or WindowBlinds skin it would be uploaded to all the sites you chose to at once. We could even make it so that you could queue up a bunch of skins to be submitted. Since it would be a program and not web based, the slowness of going through the varius submission pages wouldn't be an issue.

This is just an idea right now, what do you guys think?

With so many people making XP skins, how many of you are actually plannin to upgrade to Win XP?

If not, how many of you are planning to stick with Win98/ME?

Here are this month's website results:

Contrary to what we believed and said at the end of last month, traffic increased significantly this month. Traffic was up an additional 26% this month to around 170,000 unique daily visitors and 351,000 total visitors (up from 271,000 visitors in May).

Around 60% of the users who came to WinCustomize came from bookmarks or typed it in. Leaving 40% of the users to come from other websites.

To stress again, referrals are the lifeblood of a website. Without referrals, no site can grow.

Here’s where our visitors came from who were referred:

Stardock: 63% (down from 68% in May)
Deskmod: 11%
DeviantArt: 2.8%
LotsOfSkins: 2%
LS2K: 0.2%
LightStream: 0.2%
ShellFront: 0.2%

Sometime in early June, the traffic of the site increased to the point where our existing bandwidth could no longer handle it. This site has a monthly grant from Stardock the is fixed. That grant pays for considerable levels of bandwidth but is not enough to cover the increased bandwidth. WinCustomize has purchased bandwidth that effectively triples the amount of bandwidth dedicated to the site.

The solution chosen is to begin selling WinCustomize CDs now, T-shirts soon, mugs and hats a bit later and other things later on. Through the sales of these things we can continue to pay for the increased bandwidth we’re currently enjoying. To pay for the new bandwidth, we need to sell 250 units per month.

The CD will likely only meet 20% of that goal each month. We hope to have T-shirts and mugs available in July. And eventually some other things by Fall.

Stardock has released a new version of its popular GUI customization software, WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds allows users to completely change the Windows GUI to look however they want it to look (like another operating system or something completely different). The program also allows users to add new buttons to the title bar such as roll-up buttons, MP3 controls, program shortcuts, and more. Version 2.2 is significantly faster than the previously public version (2.12 released last Winter).

Just to get an idea of how much bandwidth skin sites need nowadays, consider this:

The #1 download here by itself - WinXP V7 icon package would require 3 56k modems running at full 56k full time in order to satisfy the bandwidth for it.

It would overwhelm the bandwidth of a site running a full ISDN line (128K).

In fact, just to handle that one skin (icon package), the site would need at least a fractional T1.

It would use about 5% of the bandwidth skinz.org had at the end of last year.

Every 10 minutes, it's been downloaded by 7 new people 24 hours a day.

So when you wonder where all the skin sites rae going, it's because skinning is becoming very popular. It means that skin sites are not just expensive but think of the constant hard drive crunching that the servers must do on these sites.

The community is growing -- rapidly.

A cool little flash series is about to begin that looks pretty good. For all you martial arts people, this is a cool thing.

Stardock has released a free massively multiplayer space action strategy game called Stellar Frontier. In the game, you take command of a star ship and must help the empire you choose to side with conquer the galaxy. As your exploits grow, you gain in rank which gives you access to bigger and better ships.

It appears that eFront finally pulled the plug on skinz.org. It's gone.

This isn't completely new news but the full story from the Admins of Litestep.net have put up news. Litestep.net is down and looks like it'll be down for awhile. Visit the link to find out more.