Month: September 2005

Our new preferences link system is now in place. If you already have a page set up and ready to go, this shouldn’t affect you. If you click on the Preference link (by CUSTOMIZE: on your start page) you should be redirected to the preferences page as usual (this link is hidden to those who already have everything setup). The difference, however, is that the start page you just came from should already be loaded in the themes. We just thought it would make things a little easier as we get closer and closer to 100 pages.

It’s very important that you let us know if you encounter any errors! To report an error, just go to the contact page and tell us what happened. Maybe your “Click Here to Make Homepage” link won’t go away even though you’ve already set it as your homepage. Maybe a graphic looks funny or won’t load. Maybe the name in the title bar is wrong. Maybe you got a 404! In any case, just send us a little email and tell us what’s up. Thanks!

We have finally begun work on Movie and TV themes. Our among our first will be “Kill Bill” and “I <3 Huckabees." The pages will work the same as the current band related ones. The default links (which can be changed, just like the current band ones) will be as follows: A link to the movie's Internet Movie Database Page, a link to the official movie site, a link to purchase the DVD of the film on Amazon.com, and a link to the movie's Yahoo Movie listing.

A new system has been put in place to update the middle "info" section of each page. It's being tested. If you see a link to the new project by our developer on your page, everything is working! The test should be done soon. We want to make sure this code works on all possible browsers and operating systems.

There was some trouble with the main search feature reported last night, and it's now up and fixed. We've revamped the search system on our end so we can fix it easily if such a thing ever occurs again. We're focusing our efforts now on recoding our gallery page to include categories (Currently Music, Movies, and Other) and also a separation of these categories in the preferences page. We would like the preference link on a specific page to take you to the preferences with that page already loaded in as the theme. That way if you were on, say, the Plain Black start page and clicked the preferences link, your theme would already be set to plain black in the preferences. That would eliminate hassle in defining your preferences.

As the site grows we are always concerned with simplicity first. This gets difficult as our page index grows, but we’re taking our time to ensure that these new additions are being done right.

It’s been over a week since we’ve updated so I think we’re due. We’ve added a new contact form incase you don’t have an email client like Thunderbird. We’re working on a set of general, black and white, simple plain awesomestart pages. We’ve gotten a lot of requests for these, so now that the Killola page is done we’re going right to them. More updates all weekend.

Alice in Videoland, Lullacry, and Franz Ferdinand are now online. We have over fifty themes at this point, and are working on a new gallery system to accommodate the large number of skins we hope to achieve as time goes on.

More major changes to the site are being made right on time for it’s 2.0 launch. It should be only a few months from now. We’re redoing the look of the site to add greater functionality, decrease load time, and make everything easier to get to. In other news, our paid guest artist submissions are ending this month, so get those submissions in! We have a horde of new pages up this weekend: Eric makes his return to skinning – the My Chemical Romance page has finally been finished! Jose Ignacio’s new Carlos Santana and Led Zeppelin skins are now online. More later this weekend.

The lead developer at AwesomeStart was hit with a large malicious virus attach this weekend. Updates may be slow as he attemps to restore what he can from his backups. Please note that this will NOT AFFECT the content on AwesomeStart.com. Your pages aren’t going anywhere, don’t worry.

We finally got the thumbnail system working. Now you will see a small thumbnail of the page you’ve selected when you’re configuring your page in the preferences window. Over the next few days we’ll be integrating further automation into the site (such as a new gallery system) as well as a backdating system for this log. Finally, we’re working on some promotional graphics so you can help us by linking AwesomeStart on your own site or blog. Phew!