From technology to politics to video games; these are the random thoughts of a geek with too much time on his hands

As WinCustomize 2007 was developed, we ended up adding a lot of features we weren't 100% sure on where to place or how to link to.  As a result, there are a lot of pages and views that are hidden away so you'll only get to them if you specifically know where to look.

One of those features is the list of all Master Skins.  Right now, if you're looking for one, you have to go to a specific gallery and dig through a sea of skins trying to pick out the ones with the Master Skin seal by the screenshot.  In a gallery like WindowBlinds, that can mean going through dozens of pages to find them all.

Well, it turns out we have a filter feature on the site for Master Skins, it's just not linked anywhere you can click on.  So today, I share with you the secret of listing JUST Master Skins

See the Most Recent Master Skins

First, you can just get a quick summary view of the four most recent Master Skins in all galleries.

https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?filter=premium

All you do there is add the URL parameter "?filter=premium" after skins.aspx.  Ta-da!  The most recent Master Skins on the site, sorted by gallery.

See All Master Skins in a Specific Gallery

Now, some galleries have far more than just four Master Skins.  Take WindowBlinds for example.  There are currently 22 Master Skins in this gallery dating all the way back to January of 2007.  That would be dozens of pages to sort through manually, but you can quickly see them all with this link:

https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=1&filter=premium

Here's how that one works... you have skins.aspx?libid=1  which takes you to the WindowBlinds gallery.  After that we add "&filter=premium" to view just the Master Skins.  Do this for any gallery by just changing out what libid is equal to (Dreams are 50, DX Themes are 31, DX Widgets are 34 and Suites are 22)

There you go, now you know how to quickly hunt down all the terrific Master Skins ever released here on WinCustomize!


Comments
on Jan 04, 2008
Lovely jubbly!   
on Jan 04, 2008
That seems like an aweful lot of work just to look at a gallery. Why couldn't you make it a catagory? For example, if I go into the windowblinds gallery, my location is Home/Gallery/Visual Styles/Windowblinds/All Catagories/Last Updated. If I click the arrow for All Catagories, I get a list for Computers, Holidays, OS, etc... Can't you just add Master as one of those catagories?
on Jan 04, 2008
Right on! I whole heartedly agree with nyteinc.
on Jan 04, 2008
every library has category filters within it.. this is a window blinds category filter, to separate all of them in to their own library would be.. well you get the idea...
on Jan 04, 2008

It was one of those filters that was overlooked in the original launch.  It's on the fix-list for the next site update.

on Jan 04, 2008
another problem: when you click next page, filters (including the current vista ready, wb6 ready filters) are not remembered.