IBBoard

Now I don't have anything against people who use IE, and hopefully IE7 might even be an improvement, but I'm always impressed by the browser usage stats for the Skins @ HWT website.

Granted, it's a gaming website, so people are more likely to go and download an alternative, but here are the current stats from the first month (roughly, it's actually one month and half a day)

Internet Explorer	1733	 	62.6 %
Firefox			880	 	31.8 %
Opera			68	 	2.5 %
Mozilla			32	 	1.2 %
Netscape		29	 	1 %
Safari			16	 	0.6 %
Konqueror		1	 	0 %

Over 30% Firefox usage and nearly down to 60% IE usage (it keeps moving between 60 and 65%) - now that's the way I like it!

OK, so I haven't done any website programming so far - I've been working on the Dawn of War Pattern Switcher instead. One person has been emailing me in the past couple of days about a problem with it. It ended up being a mistake in the folder structure on his part and a minor flaw in the way the code decided whether it had anything to import for a given race, but it has now been fixed. I also wanted to add the capability to switch RSH files, since Sandwichwarrior released his amazing Fixed Colour Aspect Warrior skins, which use RSH files.

As well as all of that, I've also made use of some event-driven code and a new progress window - things I'd only consider doing because of some of the code I've seen on my Industrial Experience placement of the past year.

I'm going to be working on updates for the CMS today. I've managed to get a different format for the URLs working, it just involves some back end work as well to make it fully compatible. Once I'm done, everything will look like a nice normal HTML site although in some cases that'll be a nice normal HTML site with a query string as well

Also, I've got a list of improvements and extra features to add/check (mostly, but not all, user visible) that covers almost a side of A4. Some of them are comparatively low priority and will be done after some more skinning, but others will be worked on today.

More news once I've actually started doing some of the work!

Today is my birthday! I've not done much (wandered into Manchester, met up with my brother, watched Eddie Izzard's Circle DVD, probably lounging and watching CSI:Crime Scene Investigations series 4 on DVD tonight) but I am 21. I'm old

As for the websites, I've about got an improvement for the Downloads area complete. I'll upload it tomorrow, update all of the Dawn of War downloads so that they reference the top few relevant downloads (including some on Hangar-8's site - the link exchange is now done and traffic is flowing )

OK, the design has had a bit of shuffling around and trimming to neaten it up. The important bits are still there, but it still looks like a normal blog. This will, of course, be remedied later.

But the topic of this message - the Winter Assault design that I want to use on Skins@HWT for a while when the Winter Assault expansion comes out. I made two colour schemes based off a header image, the second Winter Assault design is acceptable, but not great, the first was far too pale and blue.

So, the design is now in the big beyond, although not a very big beyond because only one other person knows about the blog so far!

[Update] Just ignore the colour difference on the slanted corners (if you're using a modern browser like Firefox or Opera) - I've just been lazy so far and not recreated the images in the new colour scheme!

A blog seems to be such a common thing now - anyone from political idealists to programmers and website designers to any old person who just wants an online diary that others can read. And now I'm getting in on the act!

I started with the IBBoard.co.uk domain as a place to host my forums (Internet Bulleting Boards, hence the domain!) and then took IBBoard as my name on lots of forums. Then, after moving my website to an IBBoard subdomain, I've finally moved it to its own domain (the main Hive World Terra and the Dawn of War site Skins@HWT plus the HWT Forums) leaving the IBBoard domain empty. Since I'm no longer working and am currently on holiday before doing my final year at University, I thought I'd start a blog, just on the off chance that anyone cares!

So here it is, IBBoard the blog, with it's very first message and a default skin that will definately be changed at some point!