The Skin Changer

This web site changes its skin “every hour on the hour”. In other words, it changes its color scheme and the associated set of images regularly and automatically. There are 13 different skins and image sets. The skins and images are balanced for color (on all pages), so that the chances of color clashes are low. As some of the blog postings have pictures, color clashes on the page are still possible, but less likely.)

This page gives you the possibility of changing the skin, but only if you arrive here at the right time. There is a need to be frugal with this capability, because each time the skin changes all web site pages need to be re-cached and that slows the response time for page presentation. An occasional change has no impact, but it would be unwise to make skin flipping available all the time – that might cause problems if it was used frequently. As a consequence…

The ability to flip the skin has been limited to the first two minutes past the hour, and only for any hour that divides by three.

Skin Shedding

You can only change the theme if the time displayed below ends in 00 or 01 and the hour is 00, 03, 06, 09, 12, 15, 18 or 21.

When those conditions are satisfied, click on the “Shed A Skin” button and the page will refresh with a new theme. If you press the button at any other time, you will simply be sent to a completely random posting somewhere on this site.

Skin shedding occurs on a regular cycle of 13. All the 13 color themes are illustrated above, in order. If you change the skin, the new theme will be the next one in sequence. However, it is entirely possible, even likely, that two or more people may clash in their desire to change the skin. If this happens then you may appear to skip over a theme, but what really happened was that you were in a queue and an intermediate skin or two was shed before your request took effect.

If you arrive on this page at the right time, it is best not to linger, as the “shed a skin” button will only work until 5 minutes past the hour.