Change of Servers, Change of Function

Although not seen on the front of the site, much has been happening behind the scenes at Skinyourscreen.com. After recovering from the site hacks by Turkish script kiddies I promised that the site you are looking at would be merely a temporary solution. Our role has evolved since the birth of the site, from a skinning instruction, to a community to get ideas and help from, to an AstonShell theme-park. Homies – SYS is about to evolve again:

As traffic has decreased, so have my hobbies and priorities. Family and work education commitments certainly come first, but it’s been a tremendous joy to get to know like-minded skinning enthusiasts. I’ve debated many possible alternatives for Skinyourscreen.com. Should I move its direction towards web-design and programming? Should the site become a Mac enthusiast site? Make skinyourscreen.com into SkinWiki? Become a general customization and tweak site? Remove forums and focus more solidly on the podcast?. Another alternative often bounced around in my cranium has been the conversion of the site to merely a personal portal – find mrbiotech’s themes here so to speak.

There are some guiding parameters that keep me from making this just a mrbiotech site, however:

1. We host many user-contributed themes .
2. We host many great user-contributed tutorials .

I am determined that all these great contributions from users in the community remain intact on the site, as well as the interactions with one another that we have previously enjoyed.

So here’s what’s gonna happen in the next few months:

• Skinyourscreen.com will become a new custom-coded “social” web-app integrating the best of SkinWiki , our links, tutorials, and downloads. (Yes, I’ve been VERY busy on this behind the scenes).
• Skinyourscreen.com will see a change of web-host providing some additional programming flexibility, namely Ruby On Rails on which the new infrastructure is built.
• Skinyourscreen.com social-interaction will move away from forums and focus more on chat and real-time communication strategies.
• All existing themes, downloads, and tutorials will remain online.
  • If you currently have themes hosted with us and are interested in creating a custom web-layout or spread to advertise them, please email me – this is a FREE service I’m offering to skinners.

So, in short, you’re gonna see a lot of the the loose SYS stuff we already have come congeal into a more simple, intuitive and integrated package.

Anyone smell a site-theme contest coming?