Tuesday, 20 August 2002

• The Xanga Skins submissions have been great! There are soooo many I have to check now, but this is a good problem to have .

  Just wanted to write a quick post for all of you who have submitted a skin or are thinking of submitting one... If you submitted it a while ago and you're wondering why it hasn't appeared in the directory yet, here's the deal:

  • I simply may not have gotten to it yet - I'm trying to go through and check each Xanga Skin in the order of submission. Sometimes I'll break that pattern to get a really remarkable skin quickly into the directory or to get a new designer into the directory. But I'm trying to stick with a first come, first serve approach.
    
    
  • Your skin just wasn't quite ready for prime time - hah, some of the submissions have been obvious jokes. But others have not appeared in the directory because they failed to meet some basic guidelines (that, until this post, have been available only to mind readers who could see inside my head ).

  So to get the rest of you into the game, without further ado I present to you some Xanga Skin Submission Guidelines (this list will grow over time, I'm sure, but here's a start):

  1. If you didn't make the graphic, please don't include it on your skin (unless you have the permission of the original designer and you give props to that designer on the skin - e.g. "swank pics used with permission from the_jpg_jedi").

  2. Please do not use remotely-linked graphics (I realize this is a problem for Xanga Classic users, so I've actually already moved some remotely hosted graphics over to my own xanga account for submissions by some Classic users. But for all you premium users out there, please make sure you that all the images you use in your Xanga Skin are uploaded to, and linked from your own Xanga site)

  3. No background music please - this one's usually a copyright issue - you saw what happened to Napster - 'nuff said

  4. No commercial links or banners, please (to stuff outside of Xanga, that is) - again, it's a copyright issue - some of these companies may not want their images or advertisements to appear on xanga sites. I'll have to remove this stuff before I can get your skin into the directory, and if I've got a lot of skins to get through... well, now you'll have a better idea why yours might not have appeared in the directory yet .

  5. A background image or a single line of text is not a full Xanga Skin. To qualify for the directory, a Xanga Skin has to show at least your weblog entries, and ideally some other stuff like your profile info, blogrings, etc. You can learn all about creating full Xanga Skins at the Xanga Skins Site.

  6. Give yourself some credit! This one's not necessary, of course, but I almost feel compelled to add "This Xanga Skin brought to you by your_name_here" when I don't see designers crediting themselves. It's ok to give yourself some props for the awesome skin you've designed. Other Xanga users like to know who designed their Xanga Skin... and if they don't like to stare at your name, they can just remove the link from their skin.

  Phew - ok, maybe not a, "Quick post." That's all the guidelines I've got for now.

  Thanks again everyone. And let me know how you're liking the Xanga Skins (and how you think we can improve them)!

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