Month: November 2005

It appears that our fight with downtime isn’t as over as we would have liked it to be. We will be moving the server this week, and that should fix the downtime issue once and for all. We want to thank everyone for sticking with us during these problems!

Eric has been working quite a bit on the new TBMChicago, so the updates last week were few in number. We’re going to be updating on double time this week to make up for it. On a side note, the new TBMChicago should be up on January 26th.

We’ve also tweaked our request system to help streamline updates. We’re doing our best to keep design.awesomestart.com up to date.

We’ll let you know more about the server move as we get closer. With a little planning, we may be able to avoid any downtime in the switch. Thanks again, everyone!

We want to welcome Vickie Bouchard to our design team. She’s the one behind the new Corpse Bride page as well as a handful of others that are due out this week. You can see what’s she’s working on at our new subdomain design.awesomestart.com.

The auction was a success! We raised over $200 and can pay for our new server. Thanks to everyone who bid over the weekend.

The submission system will continue to undergo changes. We want the users to be able to select from a drop down that will tell us what kind of submission it it – music, movie, or other. We’ll be adding another section soon, but for right now these are the ones we’re going to focus on. We’re also working on a few more staff related pages before we extend an open request for designers. It’ll be a busy week, but we’re going to keep those themes coming every day. Today’s theme is a long time request by Julie Morris – The Postal Service.

We were offline today from 4:23 PM to 10:51 PM (CST). The outage was due to a hosting upgrade the site has received. We’ve had to move AwesomeStart around a bit to accompany the new traffic, and we want to let everyone know this was a one time upgrade. The server will handle much more traffic now, and we shouldn’t have to worry about anymore bandwidth issues.

We want to thank everyone for sticking with us during the outage. The downtime came a bit earlier than expected, and so there wasn’t a whole lot we could do to notify our users. We know it caused a little bit of panic, but there is nothing to fear. This site will be here forever. This is no longer just a little hobby of ours. After the recent boost in traffic, several of us are taking on this project full time.

The server-side upgrades aren’t all that’s new – there’s also an Avenged Sevenfold start page as well as the highly demanded AFI start page. We hope you like them!

We really appreciate the community of users we have and all you’ve been doing to promote the site in the last few weeks. As mentioned previously, this outage was rather sudden and more than a few users may be under the assumption that the site is gone. We’re asking that you send out a myspace bulletin, make a livejournal/blog post, IM your friends, or use other means to let people know we’re back online.

Thanks!

We’ve gotten a great response to our new promotion section, promote.awesomestart.com. We’re also getting a lot of new traffic from eBaum’s world as well GorillaMask.net. Thanks for the links everyone! In a nod to our new users from these very popular sites, we’ve got a newgrounds theme from a brand new freelance artist.

We’re working on a new system to manage the thousands of requestes coming in every day. Until the system is finished, we’re not going to be able to take any more theme requests. As we build this new system, we’ll still be posting a new theme five times a week for you.

Hang in there, the themes are coming!