Long-time BlogSkins users will know that we've had tags for a while (about a year), and categories for even longer (about 4 years). The truth is, tags are much, much better than categories because they allow you, the user, to create your own categories. They're like categories -- but better! And when you think about the fact that I hadn't touched the category list in, oh, I dunno, forever, you realize that the categories here were completely useless.

So out they go.

I've removed all references to categories from the UI, and enhanced the tag support. I strongly encourage all BlogSkins Contributors to tag their skins when they submit them and allow users to add their own tags. BlogSkins browsers should also tag skins on their info pages where applicable.

Other changes that have gone in recently are:

• No more My Blogs section -- it never actually worked (whoops!) anyway, and was kind of dumb. In its place we now have My Favorites.
• Three new user profile fields: url, locality, and country. Please fill these out in your settings page, and they will be displayed on your profile.
• Speaking of profiles, I fixed every broken link to a profile that I know of. So if yours wasn't working, or if you were trying to rate someone and it wasn't working, please try again. If you see other broken profiles, please note them in the comments.
• The full skin comments pages are now broken up into pages of 20 comments each, instead of one big page with (potentially) hundreds of comments on them.
• The Skin of the Day should start working properly again tomorrow.
• BlogSkins is now publishing all ~340,000 user profiles and ~318,000 skin comments as microformats. We're also pinging Pingerati with updates to those, so they're searchable in Technorati's Microformats Search.
• A few small bug fixes and UI tweaks.

Enjoy!

Updated: If your skin had categories before, your skin has automatically been tagged with those categories -- by you!