The old Sidekick Themes blog

We've moved!

2008-09-18T05:45:00.001-07:00

Rather than using an old url (http://sk3themes.blogspot.com) I've moved the blog to http://blog.sidekick-themes.com (that's sidekick-themes, with a dash!) I figured that using a blog named "sk3themes" was old and outdated since there are theme sites for all the devices now. Just as a refresher there is:
Sidekick 3 Themes
Sidekick LX Themes
Sidekick Slide Themes
Sidekick 2008 (Gekko) Themes

No Personal Requests on the front page and Themes in your email

2008-09-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hey gang, I decided to filter out themes uploaded in the Personal Requests category from the general browsing of the sites. These themes are still accessible through the Personal Requests link on the menu, as well as when you are browsing via search or by artist. I've noticed that a large number of these themes are specific to the user with pictures of them, their gf/bf, and their name most of the time. If you've made a theme for someone but you think it's something that someone else might want (i.e. it doesn't have the person's name on it), please put it in a different category so that it wil show up when everyone browses the site.

I also enabled subscribing to skLXthemes.com via email. If you sign up through the box on the menu, you'll get an email with the themes posted each day in your inbox. I want to see how this goes on sklxthemes.com first, and if people like it, I'll enable it for the other sites.

As always, I'm always interested in hearing feedback on the sites and what you think could be made better. Just email me at admin@sklxthemes.com Thanks!

-Ed

Changes to the rating system

2008-08-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

We've heard complaints from a number of theme artists about the rating system. Personally I think it's a nice way to give quick and easy feedback to the artists. Unfortunately it's been abused. In an attempt to make the rating system a little better (i.e. so that people aren't artificially inflating or deflating the rankings) we decided to expose who voted what for each theme. Now if you click on the Comments link to view the individual theme you'll see a listing of all the users that have voted. It should be pretty obvious if someone is trying to game the system. We've already noticed some suspicious behavior that's now exposed. So, to allow people to save some face and "do the right thing" we've also added a "Delete my vote" link so you can wipe out any trace of what you voted for on a theme. You can also use this if you accidentally vote the wrong number of stars and need to fix it.

Yes, you'll probably notice that some of the votes aren't matching up to the number of votes it says the theme has. This is a bug that's been lurking for quite some time. The bug is fixed for the future votes, but the numbers are still off. I'll be working on a way of normalizing all the votes so that all the math adds up in the future.

Let me know what you guys think of the openness of the rating system now.

BTW, sk08themes.com is open and in beta now as we try to implement some new features. :)

Over 100,000 registered users!

2008-03-10T13:44:00.001-07:00

I've been watching the total count of registered users on the theme sites climb. I noticed this morning that we passed 101,000 users in total! Wow! I never thought the sites would ever get this large. On sk3themes.com we have a total of 7,199 themes available and 6,062,134 themes downloaded, sklxthemes.com has 2,805 themes with 1,091,919 themes downloaded, and their little brother, skslidethemes.com, has 615 themes available with 133,023 themes downloaded.

We totally couldn't have done it without all those people out there that created and uploaded themes. If you're one of those people, let me say thank you from all of the downloaders and myself included. When will we hit 200,000?

Database problems with skslidethemes.com

2008-01-03T02:50:00.000-08:00

Sorry gang, looks like we're running into some database weirdness with skslidethemes.com. We've got the tech guys looking into things to try to figure out what's up. In the meantime, the site is temporarily offline while we fix things. Thanks for your patience!

Looks like someone got a Sidekick for the Holidays

2007-12-26T23:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, looks like Sidekick LXs and Sidekick Slides were the presents to give this year! We've noticed an increase in visits to both sites since December 24th, and we've even seen more people visiting sk3themes.com. I guess all the new LX/Slide owners are handing down the 3s? :) Unfortunately this increase in visitors has slowed things down a bit on the server. I'm doing my best to optimize everything, but I fear that one of the sites is going to have to move to a new server. If so, then this will be happening sometime in January, once all this holiday rush dies down. So hang in there, things might be a bit slow during the evenings when the sites are the most busy. Please let me know what you guys experience. Is the speed unbearable? Is it alright that you have to wait a few extra seconds for new themes? Or are you totally unable to reach the site at times? We want to hear your input. :)

Sidekick Slide Themes
Sidekick LX Themes
Sidekick 3 Themes

Browsing themes on sklxthemes.com and sk3themes.com

2007-12-10T22:11:00.001-08:00

Hey gang, unfortunately we had to disable browsing themes in large chunks at a time, i.e. no browsing 50 themes on one page. This was literally killing the server and the site wouldn't even load sometimes. So, sorry, you'll have to stick with 20 themes on a page at a time, which we figure is more than enough. It's only one extra click to load another 20. :)

Sidekick LX Theme Generator

2007-10-24T13:04:00.001-07:00

Thanks to moonrock, a bug in the Sidekick LX Theme Generator has been found. We've put a fix in place. If you've created a theme through the generator before now and the quality of the picture on your Sidekick is bad, try recreating the theme now. Should be a lot better! Sorry gang!

sklxthemes.com is LIVE!

2007-10-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

It's up, check it out. Download some themes for your Sidekick LX before it arrives. Or create your own.

So close...

2007-10-16T00:52:00.000-07:00

We're so close to an official launch of www.sklxthemes.com! Before we do we have to check on a few things as well as make some minor upgrades to sk3themes.com. We've changed a couple of things with the user system. Nothing drastic and mostly behind the scenes stuff. We worked long and hard to make sure you guys could use one login for all of the theme sites. We also put in a field for you to tell everyone your website URL. It's not being displayed yet on sk3themes.com, but will show next to your name on sklxthemes.com on launch, and eventually on sk3themes.

Btw, most (if not all) of the new features you see on sklxthemes, you'll eventually see on sk3themes in the future.

RSS Feeds and Friendly URLs

2007-10-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

Since we're working on the new sites with new features, we're occasionally sneaking in new stuff for www.sk3themes.com. Today we bring you RSS feeds. If you don't know what RSS feeds are, this video can help explain what's so great about them. If you are an RSS junkie like me, you'll know what to do.

http://www.sk3themes.com/feed (retrieves the most recent themes)
http://www.sk3themes.com/feed/artist/cnystrand (retrieves the most recent themes uploaded by an artist, in this case cnystrand)
http://www.sk3themes.com/feed/category/12 (retrieves the most recent themes uploaded to a certain category. This number can be found by clicking on the category on the main page and looking at the URL. This example grabs themes from the "Other" category)

There's also new friendly URLs to send to your friends:
http://www.sk3themes.com/artist/KittiesGoWoof - for a direct link to your themes, just replace put your username at the end instead of KittiesGoWoof's. :)

As always, let us know if you see anything acting weird, or if you have any suggestions on how we can make the theme sites better!

Sidekick Slide and Sidekick LX Themes

2007-10-09T22:40:00.001-07:00

They found us out over on the poweredbydanger forums. We are indeed working on new sites for the new Sidekick devices, the Sidekick LX and Sidekick Slide. I'm hoping to have these sites ready in time for the launch of the new devices. So stay tuned. :)

Sidekick LX Themes
Sidekick Slide Themes

The long awaited Search feature

2007-09-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

Due to a huge demand for this feature, we've snuck it into the current version of the site. Yes, that's right, you can now search for what theme you want. We've done preliminary testing with it and it seems to be running well, but we want to see it in action, so start using it! :) Let us know (admin [at] sk3themes.com) if you run into any problems, error messages, or unexpected behavior. Beta users, we expect you to hit this hard and make sure it doesn't break! Oh and theme uploaders, remember how we said you should describe your theme well? Now you have even more motivation to take 30 seconds to write a good description so people can find it amongst the 6,000+ themes!

Oh, and we also added a few more tweaks here and there to make things a little better behind the scenes. You probably won't notice those much, but the search engines will.

Looking for beta-testers

2007-07-09T23:56:00.000-07:00

We're working on some major improvements to sk3themes.com to help you guys use it easier. We need some brave souls to test it out though. Nothing difficult, just use the top secret pages we send you and let us know if anything doesn't work right, any feedback you have, and basically if it sucks or if it's awesome. Right now we're looking for people that create and upload themes on sk3themes.com. If you're interested, drop an email to admin (at) sk3themes.com for more info!

Browse by Rating!

2007-07-06T03:15:00.001-07:00

Remember how we added those little rating stars awhile back? Well now they're worth something since you can sort the themes based on their rating! So be sure to go vote for the themes you like (and the ones you don't like). To browse the highest rated themes, just select "Highest Rated" from the drop down at the top of the page or just click here. Who's theme is going to be on top? :)

Personal Themes

2007-06-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let you guys know that we're going to start removing the more personal themes that get uploaded to the site. Themes that have a picture of you, your girlfriend, your kid, your friends, etc. Basically things that only you and one or two other people would want to download. If you want to send these to your friends, we recommend emailing them directly. We're not sure why people are uploading these for everyone else to sort through. The themes created by the Theme Generator will still be left for long periods of time for multiple downloads as long as you save the link. Currently we go through and clean these all up every few months to save on space. Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this stuff or anything else on sk3themes.com

No name themes?

2007-06-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

Are you a non-US sidekick owner trying to load themes and they show up with blank names?

Open the folders and open theme.txt in notepad. You should see something like this:

# Theme name
string Name(en_US) NameOfTheme

What you need to do is take out the (en_US) so you have:

# Theme name
string Name NameOfTheme

That should do it! We've also updated the theme generator so that it creates themes that aren't english specific.

Move complete!

2007-06-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

Whew... what a day. We're finally up and running on the new server and things are looking better. There will probably be a few kinks to work out over the next few days because there were some software upgrades as well as hardware. If you see anything out of the ordinary on sk3themes.com please email us! admin@sk3themes.com

Thanks and enjoy the faster server!

New theme trick

2007-06-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

Want to include a Keyguard image in your theme as well? Just add the following line to theme.txt:

bitmap keyguard-background name-of-your-image.png

In order for this to work you have to have the default T-Mobile Sidekick 3 keyguard selected on your device and you may have to reboot (1-@-0) to reload the themes.

Server move

2007-06-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

Ok, due to some personal life happenings as well as issues with the server, the move got postponed. We're working on it right now and will hopefully (*fingers crossed*) have the site running on the new server by the end of the day. We did some testing of the new server and are basically waiting for all the files and databases and everything to be synchronized to the new server. With the size of the site and the slow speed of the old server it's taking a little longer than expected. Hang in there guys!

By the way, we've heard a lot of requests for a search functionality. We've got it in the plans and should be in the next revision of the site, along with sorting by ratings. But the server move is first priority now. :)

Server Upgrade!

2007-05-30T18:40:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone for being so patient as sk3themes goes through some growing pains! With so many themes (4300+) and so many people downloading (almost 3.4million downloads), it's been hard to keep the server from melting. So to help everyone get their Sidekick themes a little easier, I've scheduled an upgrade to the server on Friday, just in time for the weekend. If you happen to try to visit sk3themes on Friday at the wrong time (i.e. during the upgrade), you may not find the site. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere and it'll be back up before you know it. Go play a game of Sonic the Hedgehog or Dance Dance Revolution and check back in an hour or so. The web guys say the downtime should be minimal too, so you may not even notice. :) Once the server is back up and going, it should be faster than before!

Site downtime

2007-05-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

We've been experiencing some hiccups with the server lately. In short, the site is getting too busy for it's own good and it's bringing the server to a crawl. Sorry for the slowness and occasional downtime. We're actually looking into upgrading the server so that everyone can get their themes quickly and easily again. Just to give everyone an idea of how busy we are, we did over 1.5Tb (yes, 1,584 gigabytes) of data last month. That's just crazy. We never expected things to be this busy.

So hang in there, server upgrades are on their way!

psst.. early mornings and late nights are the best time to get themes, while everyone else is sleeping. :)

New rating system

2007-05-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

We just made a new rating system live on sk3themes.com, bringing us up to v3.2. The rating system is integrated more with the site and we'll be able to do much more with this in the future. The old rating system was dependent on another site for it to work and that worried us a bit. So enjoy the new system, let us know what you think, and if you run into any problems.

Testing 1, 2, 3

2007-05-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

We figured it'd be easier to explain the goings on with sk3themes.com with a blog. Hey, everyone's doing it these days, right?