As you may have noticed, there have been some changes around here.

And not just with the Teknidermy website, but with the whole interface customization scene. Tek exists to serve in that scene, so the changes in skinning directly affect the mag.

“Back in the day” you had to Want To Skin. You had to get out there and look for it, learn about it, maybe even give it a try yourself. But not anymore.

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To use a really long metaphor, it’s like we left the door open all night so our beloved dog and cat could get in our house, but a big snake came in the house too, and ate our dog and cat, and when our kids woke up the next morning, they said “My what a Beautiful Snake!” and completely forgot that we ever had a dog and cat…

And that leaves us here, lovingly remembering the dog and cat.

Tek started out as a pure magazine, but we soon noticed the surge of visitors whenever a new issue was released, and then the site was dead for the following two months. So to make things more dynamic, J dug up the Nuke thing we currently use and, to make things more lively, we started posting news. Seeing the Nuke thing also had a link section we filled it up with links to skinnable apps.

But all that is not core Tek.

Tek is, and should more prominently be by skinners for skinners, meaning people should be able to directly comment on articles and participate. And without having to sign up first. We don't need a forum, we don't need news (we're no news agency), we don't need links to skinnable apps (we're no site directory), and we don't need a member system.

We need articles and we need up-to-date articles.

Enter the new digest system. From now on articles will be published as soon as they are done. And to wrap things up, there will be a digest “issue”, containing all articles (and perhaps some more) which appeared in the past X weeks. Tek will become a “Digest” starting now. This will be the last “issue” in our previous incarnation, and we will now part from the “subscriber format”.

We do have some ideas on what to do with news, links and current events. Imagine one big cross linked site with headlines from all skin sites, a list of recent software releases and updates, a list of current contests and more of that stuff.

We will also try to make all our past articles and interviews more accessible. Please be patient with us as the site grows and changes.

Tek now basically consists of three people. Doreen is our interview gal, Kenray does editorials and article bits, and craeonics steals newsposts from other sites and writes the occasional article. In the past others have contributed and we'd like to see that happen more often. We want you to feel free to comment, contribute, interact and participate in the process here.

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At the outset of Tek, your humble editor had truly hoped, one day, to see a print magazine come of it. I sincerely doubt that will happen, at least for Tek. Perhaps someday there will be a “Visual Styles Monthly” spewing forth from Redmond, but they’ll never feature Colorpad, or interview Garoo.

So there will always be a place for a “skinners digest”.

Dig in.

— Kenray (and a bit of crae), March 28th 2002