I'm sorry for the maintenance, downtime, and sluggishness over the last couple of days. For some reason, database queries which were running quickly before started have extreme performance problems, which led to locked tables, which led to more performance problems, which led to... well... problems. I've done some optimizations and everything seems nice and speedy now.

Hopefully it stays that way.

There were a few hiccups. Hopefully everything works ok now though. If you spot any problems, please use the contact form to let me know (I checked to make sure that worked). Thanks.

BlogSkins will be moving servers tomorrow. There will be some downtime while the dns servers are changed, roughly 24-48 hours. In the meantime, you will see the maintenance page. Once you don't see the maintenance page anymore, that means that you have successfully moved servers. Thank you for your patience during this move.

So nobody has submitted any native Movable Type or Xanga skins yet. That's too bad. Somebody should.

What that means for those of you who came/come here for those type of skins is that you didn't have any to download. That's really bad. So I turned multi-format downloading back on, at least until we get some more native skins. All Blogger Main (or BM) skin types are now available in Moveable Type and Xanga types for download again. This is not the preferred solution, because a lot of times, the transformation from one type to the other does not go well. It is, however, a temporary solution to those of you looking for those skin types.

Won't somebody submit some skins for those other types? Please?

Well, that took less time than I thought. Here's a summary of the changes:

• BlogSkins supports multiple, distinct skin types. Gone are the days of converting from a basic Blogger template to Movable Type, Xanga, etc. Now all blog software types are natively supported. Hopefully this will work better for everyone.
• As a consequence of the above, all existing skins have been converted to Blogger Main and Blogger Archive Index types.
• You can browse skins by type, if you're looking for something for your Movable Type blog, for example, and don't want to look at all the Blogger skins.
• I can't possibly write preview parsers for all the skin types out there, so there aren't preview parsers for all skin types. This means that for some skins, it's impossible to preview the skin.
• To compensate for the above, you can attach a screenshot of your skin for other people to view. You can do so when submitting a skin, or when editing a skin. In the future, I'd like to move away from dynamic skin previews, and to screenshots. You can see them in action here and here.
• A few layout changes to the right-hand bar.
• Several behind-the-scenes changes to make things more reliable.
• I think that's it... I'll post more if I think of them.

What do you all think?

I'm going to be doing some maintenance on the site tonight. The site will be down starting at ~6:00pm PST and shouldn't be down for more than a couple hours. In the meantime, you'll see this maintenance page.

Thanks for your patience.

Every day. Every freakin' day, I get email from people who use this site asking for help about various non-BlogSkins related things. "How do I make this skin pink?" "How do I make my own images?" "How do I do this in PHP?"

The short answer is, "I don't know". The long answer is, "I probably don't know, but if I did, I don't have time to help you all". Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a nice, helpful guy -- in the right places. I participate in PHP mailing lists. I help people out in help-related irc channels. That's how I learned most of the webby things I know, so I like to try and give back, so to speak. But using the contact or skin complaint forms (especially not the skin complaint forms) to ask me stuff like that isn't the right forum.

I'm also not very knowledgeable about stuff that I'm not knowledgeable about. So half the time, I don't even know where to send people to answer their question(s). Until now, of course. Tutorialized is a site that has tutorials for everything. And I mean, everything. (OK, maybe not for that.) Go and check it out if you need help with something -- you'll probably find what you're looking for.

So I'm putting a link to tutorialized on the right-hand sidebar. Hopefully that will help you all find the answers you're looking for.

Today's layout changes are an indicator of other, bigger changes to come. Why? Because I only ever make layout changes when I'm working on other, bigger features. I'm not sure why, but it's true.

Anyway, you'll notice that the ads have moved, and you'll notice that the browse and search pages are a little different than before. I think of them as "cleaner".

I have some other, smaller layout changes in CVS, but I can't roll them out until the bigger changes are done. Watch for those changes, both large and small, next week sometime. If, in the meantime, you notice any problems with the new layout, please let me know.

Love BlogSkins? Hate copiers? Want to help? Have we got a deal for you.

I'm looking for a few good moderators. These moderators will go through the pile of complaints and determine if a skin should be disabled or not. This helps free up my time to code new features, and attempts to appease victims of theft. Moderators will use a web interface to moderate, and they can do so whenever they have the time.

I'm wondering, though, how best to pick these moderators. Should I appoint some? Should you appoint some? Should they be picked randomly every so often? Should I ask for volunteers? What do you think? The only qualifications I have at this point is that moderators have to have been here for a while, have to have submitted some skins (quality is not an issue), and should be active in and around the site.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.

I've received some pretty nasty emails lately about the skin copying and stealing spree that's been going on around here. For various reasons, I haven't been keeping a very good eye on this site, and I do share a certain amount of blame for not doing something more about this. But to be fair, I'm not the one stealing designs. I'm not the one putting them up on the site. I'm not the immature loser who thinks it's hilarious to piss other people off. Those are the people you should be angry with, not me.

If you'll notice in the upper right-hand corner of this page there are over 2,000 skins on this site. The vast, vast majority of them were posted by someone other than me. I can't possibly keep an eye on each and every one of them. And I know I get complaints about the specific ones that are copies, but if you saw what my inbox looked like, you'd forgive me for missing the complaints. Plus, people fill out complaints about skins and put stuff in there like, "How do I download this?" and "How come the picture doesn't work?" That's not what the form's for.

This site is also a community. With community features. Like rankings. You'll notice that people routinely rank copied skins with 0 stars. This is a control. People don't download (or even look at) skins with 0 stars. They also post comments on the skin saying it's copied. People don't download skins that people say are copied. Apparently that's not enough. So I require that you have a valid email address before posting a skin, so that people are discouraged from copying. But apparently that's not enough either.

I'm a professional programmer, so I believe there's a programmable solution to every problem. And since this is a community site, there's a programmable, community solution to every problem. So now when you fill out a complaint form for a skin, that complaint gets recorded in addition to getting sent to me. And then a complicated algorithm decides when to disable certain skins based on complaints. You, the BlogSkins member, decides when a skin gets disabled for being a copy. Because there's 77,700 of you, and only one of me.

Let's see how this goes.