You may have noticed some small changes to your startpage in the last week or so. We’ve begun implementation of two highly requested features. Users will now be able to search Images, News, Maps and more directly from the search box on their page. If you use Google technologies (which can be changed in preferences), you can now click on a link to change what you want to search. For instance, if you’d like to search for an image, click “Image” and type in your query. Then search, just like you would have for the web. No more leaving the page first!

In addition to this feature, we’re also including a new drop down menu to give you more search options. It can be accessed by mousing over the small arrow to the right of the Email link. You can now search Amazon and Wikipedia in the same manner described above. Just select one from the drop down menu, type in your search, and away you go. Popular Google search technologies for Video, Books, Scholar, Finance, Shopping, and Blogs are all also available.

These new features are now available on all Movies, TV, Videogame, and “Other” startpages. At the time of writing, they’ve also been added to our twenty most popular movie startpages. Adding the new features requires a complete overhaul of each startpage. We’re recoding each page from HTML to XHTML using a new standard template. While this will make new updates easier to add in the future, it’s certainly a lengthy process. More pages are being updated with these features every day, and we hope to have the rest of the music startpages finished in the coming weeks.

Go try out the new features. Let us know what you think!

AwesomeStart is celebrating it’s third birthday! Looking back on DevLog entries, it’s amusing to see how excited we were to have toped 100,000 users on our first birthday. That number has since grow past 1,000,000. Despite the site only being offered in english, we now have users in over a hundred countries around the world. There are countries appearing in our logs we’ve honestly never even heard of!

The DevLog has quieted down ever since the RSS feature was finalized. We’ve been working on a lot of big concepts behind the scenes. The overwhelming interest in the site, from both users as well as designers, is part of the reason these new ideas are such an undertaking. From day one, we’ve underestimated the encouraging amount of support and interest people would have in the site. To put it plainly, it just wasn’t built to scale up to this level of usage. With each new update, we’re working on changing that.

In the mean time, we’ve gotten back to cranking out those themes. This year our gallery finally broke past 400, with the current total (as of this writing) up to 432. This is thanks to our constantly growing team of designers, who’s ranks just passed fifty contributors. We’ve recently seen some of our most requested designs finally come online - it’s great to see everyone working towards bringing their favorites to the site.

As always, we continue to offer everything here for free. The best birthday present we could ask for is a mention on your blog, facebook, myspace, etc. Let people know about AwesomeStart.com!

The request system has been the subject of much tweaking in the recent weeks. After some testing, we’re adding another function to the page. One of the basic problems we’ve had since the system went online is that it accepted requests for themes that already exist. This created two real issues . . . the first is that designers would see these requests and make themes we didn’t need. The other issue is that someone coming to the site hoping to find a theme that we did in fact have would put in a request and leave thinking we didn’t.

By using a bit of the technology already in place in our search feature, we’ve changed the request function to eliminate both of those issues at once. When a request is submitted, the system will check it against our entire database of themes and return any results. If it looks like we already have that theme, it’ll inform the user of the good news and give them a link instead of submitting the request. The system is pretty smart, so it shouldn’t have any problems with slight variations on entries or seeing the difference between a movie theme that exists and a videogame theme of the same name.

Try it out!

Our request page will not only allow you to make a request, but also to see a list of every request currently in the que. With literally thousands of requests, this list was getting very long! We’ve tweaked the list so that only themes with three or more requests are shown on the page. If a theme has one or two requests, it still stays in our que - it just won’t be displayed on the page. This will cut down on database strain, page load time, and some of the 500 errors we’ve been having. This will also act as an automatic filter for improper requests and input mistakes.

Many of you probably noticed that Halo has been at the top of the request list this week, even though there’s already a halo theme! While we were upgrading our code, we seem to have created a bug that changed every input to a request for Halo. Whoops! As a result of this, the Halo (UK) band may have more requests than they should. We’ve removed the halo videogame from the requests list, and emailed everyone who requested it to let them know we’ve fixed the bug.

Set up a page!