Today we announced that the subscription price for WinCustomize was going to go up $10/year from $20 to $30.  Now, of course we had to come up with a good justification for this, something that would fool the sheep of the forums into believing we did this for their own good and that they're getting the better end of the deal.

But, just between you and me?  Complete BS. 

As some of you may know, today's Angie's birthday, so as a gift the company bought her a new car... ...

Last night we recorded the third episode of the WinCustomize SkinCast.  From what Spencer is telling me as he edits this one, it's the best so far and I think we're finally starting to get a hang for recording these.  Technical issues aside, it took about 45min of recording to get the 20min of quality content.  Most of the 20min cut out is just us laughing anyway.

So with three episodes in the can, here are some random thoughts on creating a podcast for a community site:

1. When nothing is going on of note, it's really hard to come up with a topic
   The idea behind the SkinCast is to react to what's happening in the community.  Sometimes though there isn't much happening.  For episode 2, as an example, there were very few new skins that week.  It was a lot of logons and bootskins, but no much that we could get a discussion going about.  The forums were also particularly quiet that week so there wasn't even a topic of controversy to go over. 

As you've probably already noticed, we put out an update to the central Stardock Forum system today that comes packed with fixes, plus a handful of very useful new features.  Instead of letting you guess randomly at what's new and how it works, I thought I'd give everyone a quick run-down of the new features.

Forum AnnouncementsReturn of the Report ButtonGo to Top of Thread ButtonThe New Karma SystemForum Announcements

In the past, we've been unable to let everyone know when there's a...

So yesterday I went out to my local Best Buy and picked up a copy of Mario Kart Wii for my Nintendo Wii.  Like all Nintendo consoles, it seems my game library is dominated primarily by Nintendo developed titles (Zelda, Mario, Smash Brothers).  So it just sort of makes sense that I'd go out and get the latest Mario Kart game.

Now, I have a confession to make.  In all of the previous Nintendo consoles I've owned (NES, N64, GC, GBA, DS) I've never owned a Kart game (was there even one for the NES?).  Sure I've played them from time to time at parties or at a friend's house, but I've never had enough time to really become proficient at the series.

This also means I don't come to the game with a favorite in the series to compare it to, and can't look at the game and say "Well, the driving physics aren't quite as good as they were on the N64 version, and the item management really needs to go back to the way it was in the DS title..."  So I'm basically as end-user as it gets when it comes to Mario Kart Wii.  So with that in mind, here are my thoughts after a few hours with the game yesterday...

Now, I'll admit that I'm definitely on the outside looking in of the blogging/web 2.0 community.  While I manage very large sites with a ton of users and reach, I'm still on the periphery.  Why?  Well, I live in Michigan.  Not exactly a state known for it's thriving IT industry.  If you go beyond IT services that support manufacturing companies, you can probably count on one hand the number of companies doing anything significant with online communities or digital media.

Yes, I'm a bit of a victim of geography here, and even though it's all online now, it's all IM, Twitter, email and blogging, proximity is still important.  So when I see events like Gnomedex coming up, I'm interested because it could be one of the few opportunities I have this year to actually network with other people working in my field.  And in this nebulous profession, professional networking is king.

Twitter is one of those semi-recent crazes sweeping the techno-elite across the Internet.  It seems to be continually gaining steam as more and more of the "Names to Know" jump on board and start to broadcast their lives across the tubes.  Like the blog, it's a soapbox from which you can broadcast every little thought to as many people as are willing to click and read.

I get blogs.  I get podcasts, video casts, live video feeds, live audio feeds, myspace, facebook a...

Technology, Entertainment, Design.  TED is an annual conference that has been going on since 1984 where visionaries from all over the world come together to present "Ideas worth spreading"  Originally a conference focused just on those three disciplines, it has since expanded to cover many disciplines.

The annual conference is invitation-only, so for years the only way you would get a piece of what was presented was if you were part of the elite group, or if you knew someone who went and gave you a recap later.  This keeps the conference very controlled, and keeps a feeling of intimacy and adds a bit of weight to what is discussed.  This isn't some massive industry event with press and bloggers crawling all over it.  This is about important people sharing important ideas.

Today, the US Supreme Court is set to hear a case regarding Washington D.C's 30 year ban on handguns within its borders.  In D.C. you can't even have a handgun on your private property.  This is being touted as potentially a landmark case on the US Second Amendment (the right to bear arms).

Gun control has been a hot button issue for decades now.  One group practically wants to outlaw them, another wants as many folks to own them as possible.  Every time an election comes up, it's one of those core issues everyone argues over.  That this case is going to the Supreme Court right as the 2008 Presidential Race heats up is interesting coincidence.

1: //This is a test of the codeblock plugin for Windows Live Writer 2: using System; 3: public class HelloWorld 4: { 5: public static void Main() 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"); 8: } 9: }

This is just a quick test of the "Insert Code" Plug-in for Windows Live Writer.

JoeUser Tags: blogging, misc, politics Do the tags from LW work?

My ePenis is huge...  I just got this new PC on Tuesday.  Complete with a 24" widescreen monitor and an nVidia GeForce 8800GT video card.

Stardock sites are based on a very complex and detailed articles system that has grown over the years.  Basically, imagine one gigantic forum.  Hundreds of categories and subcategories containing thousands upon thousands of posts.  Each site (WinCustomize, JoeUser, TotalGaming) takes a subset of that master list for its own forums.

We've been working on cleaning up our system the last few months.  Cleaning up data, optimizing the database etc.  This week we've been working on the master forum category list.

Today, andrew_ printed out the category tree for two sites, WinCustomize and JoeUser....

Over the last few years, streaming music has grown in popularity as more and more people get high-speed Internet connections at home.  The convenience of opening up a web browser and hitting "Play" is hard to argue against.  No more sorting through CDs, or a massive MP3 collection.  And as time goes on, the sound quality has improved to the point where there's little discernable difference to the average user.

The next step beyond just having online radio stations of preset playlists was to let users select exactly what they wanted to listen to, or be able to intelligently suggest similar music based off a small amount of user input.

At the moment, there are many online radio services from folks like Yahoo, Napster, Last.fm etc.  But this article is about two services that compete on a more direct level:  Pandora and Deezer.

Alright, I missed out on last week's fidget, but I blame that mostly on the fact that I took Friday off and didn't touch my PC pretty much the entire weekend.  It was a much needed and helpful bit of rest.  I gamed, I slept, I watched a lot of TV and generally did nothing productive.  But now I'm back again with a weekly wrap-up of what I've been up to and my random thoughts.

What I've Been Playing

Burnout Paradise
I finally got the Burnout License, and have ro...

This is a public service announcement for everyone who uses Microsoft Word, Frontpage, Expression or some other separate WYSIWYG editor to write your blog posts and then paste them onto JoeUser:

Don't do it.

These tools do their own special formatting, and all a lot of junk tags that don't play nice with the site (they didn't play nice with the old site either, but you didn't always notice since we weren't doing half the things we're trying to do on the new site.