Talking with Toasty on the "History of Skinz.org"
Interview by Doreen

On behalf of the Teknidermy staff  I would like to say Thank you so much Toasty for taking the time out of your busy schedule to share this with us and the readers of Teknidermy!

Tek: How did the idea of Skinz.org develop and come about and who's idea was it? A combination of you and few friends sitting around discussing the idea, or was it you alone dreaming up the idea and working it into play?

Toasty: Skinz.org was originally started by the following four (4) people; mian, Toasty, tfboc, and tpk. The idea came about one day while sitting
around tossing out ideas for a site, I believe it was tpk who first got the wheels spinning on a 'skin archive' though. At the time, mian and I were
both working on a program we developed called eFX, a Windows skinning application, and we had already done a lot of work on LiteStep, a Windows shell replacement, as part of the LiteStep development team, so we were very familiar with the concept and technologies of skinning at the time, so we immediately pounced on the idea realizing that there were already a lot of eFX fans and dozen skins and our beta testers making more every day and that it would be a great idea as a place to archive these and put them on display for artists to share their work and the general public to come view and download them. Pretty soon the whole conversation with just buzzing with energy and ideas left and right and we realized we needed more than just programmers, mian and I, to pull it off, so we immediately started pitching the idea to tfboc and asking for his help in the project for ideas and design of the website. With a little bit of effort we convinced him of the idea and with the magic powers of tfboc's credit card we soon had the domain name Skinz.org registered.

Tek:   Can you remember the date when Skinz.org went live? A lot of the old timers from Skinz.org cannot recall just how long they have been hanging out over there including myself but we know it was sometime in 1998 or there about?

Toasty: It was registered on November 25th, 1998, the first page was up and live 3-4 days later. For those who were around, you may remember what it originally looked like, it was pretty embarrassing, but what do you expect for 3-4 days? The Skinz.org design and site you know now first went live in March of 1999 after several months of development while the old design held up. The new design was a massive over haul, both visually and internally making it into the dynamic skin site it is today with continuous upgrades over the months since.

Tek:   Are you surprised at the success of Skinz.org is having now or did you always presume it would be a successful Skin Repository Site?

Toasty: I presumed it would be a success, but at the time we measured success on a much smaller scale. I remember making a home page years ago and being excited to have received about 1,000 hits in a single month, within a few days of Skinz.org's birth it was already doing that kind of traffic in a single day, it blew my mind and we were all very proud of it and didn't even conceive of the numbers we would some day reach. By the time the new design was launched in March of 1999 we were doing 200x (times) that amount of traffic. Now with a few years of development behind us we no longer measure success in thousands, but rather tens of millions. It's a completely different viewpoint for us now, one I never dreamed of looking through before, and I have to tell you, the vista is beautiful.

Tek:   What do you see in the future for Skinz.org?

Toasty: Hopefully continued growth, we started off wanting it to be a place to archive skins, mainly for eFX but we soon saw the potential for skins of all sorts of applications and we knew this was going to be a big thing, so we wanted to make Skinz a definitive resource for all things skinnable. We wanted to tell the world about skins and allow people to see things differently, to feel it's okay to express themselves, even if through their
desktop. To put it simple our goal was to bring awareness to the rest of the world of skins, to bring skinning up from the underground and make it
something common place, we wanted the Microsofts and IBMs of the world to notice skins and see them as something viable so that one day almost all applications would be customizable to the end user. I can proudly say we achieved that goal. I think we crossed our mile stone when Microsoft,
RealNetworks, etc. suddenly woke up and said, "hey, we need to make our products skinnable." With the announcement of Microsoft seeking to hire skin artists for R&D into the future of their OS's and Windows Media Player, I knew we had accomplished what we set out to do, and that skins are here to stay. That doesn't mean it's all over, there is still much to do, and hopefully Skinz.org will continue to lead the way in making skinning easier, better distribution and installation of skins, and keeping the community that helped start it all together.

Tek: What kind of life span do you think Skinz.org will have?

Toasty: Skins are here to stay now, major commercial industries have become aware of them and the significance of them and so there will be a market for archiving and distribution of skins and skin content for many many more years to come. Obviously Skinz.org will underground changes, and has. Changes of design, content, and even management. But Skinz.org is really the users, the community around it, and I think there will always be someone willing to carry the torch.

Tek: What kind of background do you have that has assisted in the creation and development of Skinz.org?

Toasty: My current job is programming, I've been programming since grade school, from an Atari, to an Apple IIe, to an 8086 PC and up. I really enjoy it for the problem solving aspect of it, but my true passion is art. I grew up wanting and thinking someday I would be an artist. Of course things don't always turn out the way we imagine them, but I've managed to find the medium that makes me happy, I get to be creative, artistic with my programming, and create new ideas and new applications. And I really got to collide those two passions when it came to skins, programming on applications such as LiteStep and eFX that brought artistic expression to the computer screen. So my experience in programming is what really helped me develop the backend for Skinz.org, and the artist inside me helped orient the site to those who made it a success, the artists, the skinners.

Tek:   Do you miss Skinz.org now that you are trying to concentrate on other things? Especially since Skinz.org is kind of your Child site?

Toasty: Of course I do, I always will. Skinz was a big part of my life, it shaped me through that phase in my life everyone goes through growing up
wondering what they're going to do, what they will be, Skinz helped me figure that out for myself. I also met a lot of great friends in the process
and it was the first thing that really proved us, as a team, could pull it off, that we could build something from our imaginations and make it
successful, and we could do what we loved for a living. Now we've moved on and formed our own company, but we never would have without the experience and lessons Skinz brought us.

Tek:   Can you give us a little inside scoop on who Toasty really is? Age, Education, Family life, Boxer or Briefs?

Toasty: Maybe a little, wouldn't want to scare all your readers away. My real name is Chad Boyda, I'm 21 years old, a June baby, Geminis rule! I
currently live in California, where 90% of the rest of the country's computer geeks live, in the Silicon Valley, where rent is so high we all
have to live off ramen. I was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and moved all over the country as an army brat until my Dad finally quit the service,
and I've spent the last 13 or so years in California, where I'm most comfortable. I had straight A's in school and have been in gifted programs
since the second grade, but to everyone's surprise I dropped out of high school after only 2 years. I didn't really drop out, I have the legal
California equivalency of a high school diploma, and no, it's not a GED. I have what's called a CHSPE, which is an alternative solution to a high
school diploma stating that you've learned and know all the requirements you'll get out of high school for anyone who is 16 years or older. I
sometimes regret quitting, and at the time I did I was planning to go off to college, but I soon realized the very reasons I did quit I would feel the
same way about in college. I was tired of doing useless assignments and I wanted to apply myself to the real world. So here I am, co-owner of thirty4 interactive LLC which I co-founded with a couple partners and we're doing pretty good. Success hasn't come cheap, we worked hard and spent years making basically nothing, but it's finally paying back. Someday I may go to college, but not for career purposes, I feel very comfortable with the direction of my career right now, but I may return to school someday to explorer other interests such as fine art. My parents are divorced, who's aren't? But I love my family and have two younger brothers and one older sister. My personality is that of a Gemini, twins, alter egos, I never seem to have a medium and people often think I'm either crazy and rambling or I'm shy and quiet. It all depends on my mood, and my mood swings turn on a dime, but I'll always keep things chaotic and exciting for you because I'm too easily bored to stay on the same path for too long.

Tek: Can you share with us what kind of projects you are currently working on?

Toasty: My full time job currently is co-owner of thirty4 interactive LLC. I handle a lot of the business operations day to day, but my main job is
programming. We have a lot of exciting projects currently in development, but unfortunately I can't tell you about those ones. The ones I can tell you
about are listed on our website at http://www.thirty4.com/. There are five co-founders of the company, 3 of us from Skinz.org, mian (Damian Hodgkiss),
tfboc (Bryan Beretta), and I and the two new members to the group, Mitch Traver and Adam Traver. One of our more popular projects right now is
Napigator. It's sort of a plug-in for Napster that allows users to view real-time stats of Napster and OpenNap servers around the world and choose
which server they want to connect to. This allows users to search different servers for files, connect to the ones that have better ping times for them,
meet friends on a specific server, and connect to the OpenNap servers which the Napster client by itself cannot. OpenNap is a free open-source project that allows anyone to setup their own Napster-compatible server. We also have a couple smaller websites up currently, but our biggest project, Caverns Network, is not yet released, but will be soon and I can guarantee you'll be hearing a lot about it.

Tek: Are these projects related in any way to Skinz.org or are they entirely Different?

Toasty: We no longer work on any Skinz.org related projects, although we have made several skinnable applications, eFX, sysmeter, and Skins Browser in the past, which are readily available from our website. Currently though we're kind of burnt out on developing skin related applications, 2-3 years on one thing can do that to you, but we still enjoy and appreciate skins and Skinz.org and you will probably always see somewhat of a skins influence in our projects. Our current development project, Caverns Network, which has been in development for over 7 months now should make visitors of Skinz.org feel right at home with graphic contributions to it from the likes of misery in motion, fathom, and essvid.

Tek: If you would like to see the original layout of skinz.org click here (be sure to click on the drop down menu at the very bottom to view different weeks)

Thank you again Toasty this was a pleasure.

Tek: After my interview with Toasty I realized we did not cover when Shoggot and loc came aboard on skinz.org so I went to the source...

Shoggot: okay my history with skinz:  In the very early days / weeks of the #skinnerz IRC channel (at the time, #skinners), skinz.org was still in its old format. As a regular in the channel actively involved with skinning, I beta-tested their new layout for them.-a few weeks pass- ICQ+ comes into being; mian mentions it to me, so I produce the first skin ever for ICQ+ (aside from the defaults). It was -not- a photoskin, but lord, it wasn't good, considering the limitations of the app. A few hundred (300, IIRC) skins were quickly added by others. mian became dissatisfied with the state of the ICQ+ section, and started the odious task of weeding out the (few hundred) photoskins. I volunteered my services to help, so he made me an admin (he gave me full privileges at that point, probably because it was the easiest way to go). I made my first news post a few weeks later, and was introduced as part of the team =)

l0c came a few months later, after the final fall of custo; initially only as a news poster. 
Not widely known is that now, l0c is also one of the main back-end devs for skinz.

An addition to the verifying team some months ago was cyberpuke (who seems to wish to remain somewhat behind the scenes).

D.Spayre came in a bit after cyberpuke, but seems to have dropped off of the net =(

FearOfFours is on as a volunteer handling the What Is sections.

Integer will eventually be in charge of the dump section, after I write up the appropriate php3 controls for him to use =)

Tek: And there you have it folks!!! The History of Skinz.org the past  to the present and I can't wait to see it's future! =)  Thank you _Shoggot_!

With such a talented group of people behind the scenes of skinz.org I have no doubt they will have continued growth and success!

And for you people who have never visited skinz.org you can visit skinz here at  http://www.skinz.org/