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February 8, 2005
Search Temporarily Disabled

I had to temporarily disable the search page today. Here's why:

Currently searches take a very long time to process ("very long" here means greater than 15 seconds). During that time, the skins table is locked. While the skins table is locked, anything else that wants to use it has to wait. Since this site is called BlogSkins, almost every page hits that table in some way. All those pages have to wait. This makes the site slow.

I can come up with a solution to this, just not right now. So for the sake of the rest of the site, I have temporarily disabled the search page.

Update: I made a small change that may make searches take longer but will allow other things to not have to wait as long. Search is now re-enabled.

February 2, 2005
State of the BlogSkins

I'd like to take a moment to highlight some features that have been added over the last few weeks:

  • Every once in a while people would email me and tell me that they wanted to "cancel" their account. I'm not sure why they'd want to do something like that, but to make it easier for those folks, you can now do that from your settings page.
  • Some people like to put tagboards in their profile. Sometimes this ends up screwing up the settings page, so that you can't edit your profile. There is now a "reset profile" link at the top of your settings page so that you can delete your About Me section without emailing me to do it.
  • Speaking of profiles, every comment on every skin and every forum message you've ever posted is now listed on your profile page.
  • There's a new feed for comments/rankings for each skin.
  • My favorite feature ever: You can now browse all the skins that have thumbnails. [this is good]
  • Lots of under-the-hood tweaks as well as various wording changes and such.

There's more to come, so stick around.

January 21, 2005
Slowness

We've having some major speed/load issues at the moment. Every time I fix this it's ok for a while, and then it comes back. I don't have time to look at it right now, but I will tomorrow. Of course, by then, it will have fixed itself.

Update: Things seem to have calmed down now, without me doing much.. One thing I have done is limit the maximum number of connections per ip address to four. This should help limit the damage when bots crawl the site. If this has adverse effects on you, though, please let me know.

November 30, 2004
Submitting Skins Fixed

Sometime last night the skins table crashed. This was causing strange errors including not being able to submit skins. I was able to repair it just now, so things should be ok now. I don't believe any data was lost.

November 24, 2004
There Are Graphs

Those of you who are interested in some of the details behind BlogSkins will probably enjoy the new stats page. Right now it only has graphs of the new users, skins, and downloads every month, but I intend to add more. If you have any suggestions, I'm more than happy to take them in the comments to this post. Many thanks to the author of the software I'm using to make the graphs -- I'll be registering the software shortly.

November 20, 2004
"Top X" Lists Reset

Long-time BlogSkins users may remember a time when the Top 15 Rated and Top 10 Downloaded lists over there on the right were reset every so often to give newly submitted skins a chance to make the lists. I don't remember when that stopped happening, and I don't remember why it stopped happening, but it did. Starting today, however, it's back. On the 1st and 15th of every month, at 02:00 GMT, the lists will be reset. Lifetime rating and download count will remain untouched on the skin info pages.

Any questions can be posted in the comments of this entry.

November 19, 2004
BlogSkins Forum Highlight: **Tips on making layouts*
I missed this thread when it was originally posted, and probably never would have known about it if someone hadn't sent me an email about it. BlogSkins user met3ora started a thread on **Tips on making layouts*, that everybody should check out. There's some good stuff in there.
November 18, 2004
New Features: Forum Pages, User Pics, and Feeds
I have a few new features to announce today:
  1. I added a "pager" to the forums, so the messages are divided up into multiple pages.
  2. The user pictures are now displayed next to the poster's username in forum threads. This should help you keep track of who said what in long threads better. If you haven't set your picture yet, you can through the settings page.
  3. I have added a few RSS and Atom feeds to the site. You can read about the specifics on the new feeds page.
As always, bug reports are welcome through the contact page. Update: I added skin feeds for all contributors and skin types. You can read more about these feeds on the feeds page.
October 10, 2004
Small New Feature
There's a small new feature that I wanted to make sure everyone knew about. If you've forgotten your password and your username, you can now request they be sent to you from the lost password page by entering your email address.
October 7, 2004
Account Validation

I've been getting a lot of bounces from the account validation emails lately. Most of them are hotmail and yahoo accounts that don't exist, or whose mailboxes are full. If you're trying to validate your account, please make sure that your email address is correct on the settings page and that you can actually receive email at that account.

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Top 15 Rated
1. Simple and Clean [CD] - BM (5 stars)
2. x[DiorAngel]x - The Confession - BM (5 stars)
3. Nothing Hurts Like Love [CD] - BM (5 stars)
4. Strawberrific ; Exquisite - BM (5 stars)
5. the love equation ;vicki - BM (5 stars)
6. threw my heart away [[ juu ]] - BM (5 stars)
7. beanie - fairyland - BM (5 stars)
8. blue starry ..[miracles]` - BM (5 stars)
9. Evone - 04 - A Place Of My Own - BM (5 stars)
10. xiaoyu283 : Best Friends (Ad f - BM (5 stars)
11. Bohemian Garden - LeeDeeYa - BM (5 stars)
12. Hold Yourself Together - BM (5 stars)
13. missy-kee* SuperStar.SuperStyl - BM (5 stars)
14. Rhapsody; Ayumi Hamasaki* - BM (5 stars)
15. Rapture - BM (5 stars)
 
Top 10 Downloaded
1. blue starry ..[miracles]` - BM (2968)
2. Simple and Clean [CD] - BM (2172)
3. Nothing Hurts Like Love [CD] - BM (2114)
4. i love you (: `_ ::vicki - BM (1631)
5. Evone - 01 - The Lost Memories - BM (1619)
6. #o1. snowie_ball``those times - BM (1415)
7. __; jp0px____ii hearrtx y0ux [ - BM (1380)
8. beanie - fairyland - BM (1248)
9. Bohemian Garden - LeeDeeYa - BM (1082)
10. # xl0nestarrs- ``ii wish upon - BM (996)
[ View All ]
 
10 Most Recent
1. Valentine Bear - [[*faeryvixen - BM
2. Lonely Butterfly - shaboinqsta - BM
3. Friends -wy - BM
4. Put the name of the skin here. - MTCE
5. Welcome to my Castle - [[*faer - BM
6. Dangerous In Red - BM
7. parakeet sunshine - BM
8. Lindsay Lohan *Teenage Drama Q - BM
9. Halo remake - BM
10. be my butterfly - BM
[ View All ]
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