Few notes before I start - there's a new category on the blog for notices that are posted on the theme site. These should stay mostly sync'd, as I'm using a script to post to both.

A few hours ago, I managed to get basic searching working, though it currently only lists themes based on the submitter. Example: http://themes.chrisjs.com/search/Jeton or http://themes.chrisjs.com/search/user/Jeton. I'm not sure which would be better(/user/Jeton, or /Jeton) but either will work for now. At the moment, the URL must manually be modified to search for themes by another user, though I plan to add a page this weekend, which will also allow searching based on whether or not it has viewports, album art, etc. I also need to add a message to indicate when no themes are found, which I'll also try to do tomorrow.

Sorry for so many notices/blog posts. This should be the last one for today, unless I get another feature up.

I'm planning to get a new feature up this weekend, but I need to have all of the themes have their required patches listed in the "Required Patches" section. For almost all of the themes that are currently displayed (10 need to be approved....still need to code that..) almost none of them have the patch requirements listed, simply because I was in a hurry to get the themes up.

If you notice any themes that require patches but aren't listed in the "Required Patches" section, please click the "Report Theme" icon so that I can fix it.

http://themes.chrisjs.com/

Not quite sure how MySQL intensive this is, but it doesn't seem to be causing a problem. I now have a statistics page up that has the 12 most downloaded themes. I was planning on having a "top 10" but it'd leave two blank spaces, so it didn't make much sense. If anyone has any other suggestions for the Stats page, let me know.

http://themes.chrisjs.com/stats.php

The upload portion of the theme site is done, but I'm half expecting there to be a bug somewhere in it. Those who have themes they want to upload can test it if they want. Downloads appear to be counted properly, and KratoJet currently has the most downloads Google is still being kind of mean and isn't indexing the site yet, but I imagine it will be soon.

Tomorrow I hope to add the ability to only display themes by a particular submitter, probably in the form of http://themes.chrisjs.com/user/Chrisjs or http://themes.chrisjs.com/Chrisjs. Not quite sure which one though.. In any event, the site was designed to allow themes only by a certain user to be shown, so it shouldn't be hard to get that up. Another thing is, how would the themes be sorted? By name, or by number of downloads? Name would probably be best, and then create a separate "Stats" page, containing most downloads overall, and most downloads by a particular user.

At some point, there's supposed to be an official Rockbox theme site that will host all the themes. Scorche commented on IRC about my theme site (mainly, that a few non-CC-by-SA themes had slipped in) and said that the official theme site would be up last weekend. In any event, an official site has been planned since around December, so if/when it comes up, I'm not sure which one will be used most.

Ads. On thing's certain, there won't be any on the theme site. Even if there were, it'd have to be in either the header or the footer, and I didn't design the site to include them. However, I'm wondering about ads on this site. There aren't enough people visiting the site to generate the $10 a month needed for me to get any money, and Chitika is apparently selling my email address somehow my Chitika email address got out, as I've received 15 phishing messages to the email I dedicated to Chitika emails. Some of the emails even include emails of other users who follow the same pattern of chitika@domain.com. I've gotten some money from donations, and think I can probably survive off of them.

Well, the basics of the theme site are up. http://themes.chrisjs.com/ .

All the download links should be working, but the rest of the links may not have content up yet. I'm mostly looking for suggestions now, so if anyone has any, let me know

Final update on the theme site before it's public. Downloads work now, and I ran a script to check the links of all 100 themes on the site so far. Everything seems to be working, so once I fix the images, I can technically make it public, and slap the word beta in the title until I get the rest up

Before I make it public, I need to create a page for reporting a problem with a theme (or site) since I'm sure there's going to be a few problems at first. All the display problems with the site should be gone (except for old browsers such as IE 5) so there shouldn't be any problems viewing the site. Browsing is a different story, since I haven't gotten any other pages up yet.

The ability for "themers" to submit themes still isn't up yet, though it's partially done. There's still quite a lot of themes I need to add to the site, such as those from ABi.

Switching away from the theme site, nuclearscripting.com expired an hour ago. The site still appears to be up, but within the next few days it'll stop working, along with all the links. I believe I've gotten all the links moved, but bookmarks and posts on other sites that link to the site will stop working. Firmware files can be found at http://chrisjs.com/download/firmware, and the build downloads are already on here. If there's any pages I missed that should be moved over to this site, let me know.

I plan to have the theme site up in a few hours, but like quite a few things, I have a feeling it'll be delayed until tomorrow or Thursday.

Probably one of the last updates before the site is public. I just finished adding around 100 themes to the site (that includes name, submitter(s), info, zip file, and images) but need to add another feature to the site before I can officially open it.

So far, I've only grabbed all the themes from rockbox-themes.org, but could also add the ones from ABi. At some point the theme creators will be able to add themes themselves, but I haven't created that page yet.

However, there's a few problems with some of the themes that were grabbed. For some reason, some theme authors wanted to make the screendump two or three pixels wider. The problem is, because the image hovers are done using pure CSS, if the image isn't exactly 176x220, the rollover won't work. I counted 12 themes on the site that had an image related problem, though about three were simply because the didn't have a rollover image (in which case, the rollover image would just be the same image). Just so that I can get this site public, I will most likely just use the first 176x220 pixels, and crop out the rest, regardless of what is being cropped. This certainly isn't the best approach, though I will allow the theme creators to submit new images.

Another related note is that some of the information is inaccurate. For themes that are built off another, I plan to have the original author listed in the submitter field. So far, I haven't really done this much yet, but kind of needs to be done. Various other information, such as the description, album art, and viewport capabilities may also be inaccurate, which I need to fix. I may add a link to allow "reporting" a theme, whether it be for it not working, inaccurate information, etc.

A feature I may add is the ability to either comment on the theme, and/or the ability to email the author. The author's email address is required to submit a theme, but an option would be available to allow users to email them (default: off).

A search feature will hopefully be designed soon, though will probably just start as a sort feature. Sorting by number of downloads, theme name, and searching by artist.

Downloads still don't work, but I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Yesterday I was planning to say that we had picked a design, and we were getting ready to work on it. I didn't get a chance to post that, but I managed to design the entire site in about 5 hours. There's a little work that needs to be done, such as centering the menu (and of course, adding the themes) but it's almost ready. However, because some browsers handle CSS differently (even though the should handle it the same...) I need a few testers. Those with access to multiple browsers (and multiple versions of each, if possible) will be able to get a sneak peak of the site ;).

Testing will mostly consist of simply taking a screenshot of the entire page, and checking the tooltips, image hovers for the themes, and mouse hovers for the menu. Not too hard, I just don't have access to too many browsers.

If you want to test, post in the comments with what browsers you have access to.

I talked to Cruleworld a few days ago, and he said that he's not going to be working on his theme site much. The past few days I've been working on making my own theme site, though it will be solely for the Sansas (at least, for right now - I have it coded to allow for others when the time comes) unlike rockbox-themes.org. My reasons for another theme site:

I feel the need to see how much bandwidth I can use (ok, not really a reason, but yeah...)

Rockbox-themes.org isn't accepting new submissions due to server issues. While I have heard that there's some sort of plan to integrate Rockbox-themes.org into the official Rockbox site, I heard that months ago, and haven't seen much progress yet...

I'm taking a break from updating my Rockbox build for a little while - not quite sure how long, but I need a break. School is supposed to be a higher priority than the build, and that hasn't been true recently. However, because I want to stay involved in Rockbox, this (and other feature on my site) gives me something to do.

The site is already coded to allow searching by user (though not enabled yet) and could probably be easily extended to allow by popularity and other things. Rockbox-themes doesn't have this as far as I know, so it'd be kinda new.

An additional feature on the site is the ability for it to download attachments directly from ABi, for those who already uploaded the theme here. Support for this is kind of iffy based on how it works, so it's kind of a "half feature" I suppose... However, it should allow fetching from other URLs that don't require logging in.

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Ok, I don't know how I went from reasons for another theme site to features...must be tired. Anyway, the ability to submit themes is kind of there, but I'm not giving out the link for it until I get it working better - still has quite a few bugs. In any event, I will need some testers in the future, as well as a design, as I'm not using the one I use for the rest of the site.

Sorry about the 1 hour and 11 minutes of downtime. My host apparently made a typo on their core router, which basically killed their entire network. Site will probably be slow for the next few hours, but should be back to normal soon. Before the downtime, I was working on moving everything over from nuclearscripting.com, which expires in the next few weeks. I'll hopefully be able to finish that tomorrow. Sorry again about the downtime.