I can change all my skins in under one second. If we add the feature described below to Antville, you'll also be able to do that.

Experimenting with your skins in an online blog is kind of messy; visitors get ugly or weird pages while you are in the middle of a redesign, the server has a lot of work with replacing skins and delivering the various skin editor pages again and again, and you have to wait for each page to load. That's why I like to build a skin on my local Antville, in the comfort of my home, and upload my work when I'm done. However, I have to do this skin by skin; there's no way to do that all in one go. Until now.

I just implemented a first version of a page that lets you download all skins at once, and another one that lets you upload such a dump again. This is not only useful for the purpose described above. You can also make a backup of your skins before messing with them, or copy the layout of one blog to another blog.

I use text areas as input and output gadgets; maybe it would be nicer to implement this as a file down- and upload. Maybe I'll do that later, or someone else will, but for now I leave it like that because I already wasted enough time with it today.

My alpha-quality implementation is in there:

skinfeeder (application/zip, 4 KB)

The .skin and .hac files simply have to be copied into the skinmgr prototype. The function in the .js file should probably go into skinmgr/objectFunctions.js. The skin files contain the 'user manual'. Everything else is abvious from the code :-)

What do you think?