Month: December 2005

Hey everyone – Eric again!

As I mentioned once before in the developers log, I’m the only programmer currently on staff . . . so before I talk about what we’re planning for the site next year, I wanted to let everyone know that there won’t be any new themes until the middle of January. I will be spending a few weeks in Canada seeing my friends in Lye and then the final portion of work on the new TBMChicago begins. Our designers will still be hard at work during this time (Vickie might even be back) so expect a whole lot of new stuff when I get back. We’re all going to do our best to get fifteen new themes up before the break starts friday.

On to next year – what’s does the future hold for AwesomeStart? The number one thing we’re looking at right now is support for different languages – yes French people, we’re talking to you. Actually, we’d like to set up support for several major languages some time in 2006. Another thing we’ve been playing around with is an advanced preference menu for users that want more customization – extra links, custom page titles, additional domain searching, etc.

One big addition is that we will finally open up the design process to all users. The Design.AwesomeStart.com portal will give full details on how to sign up to be a designer, how to create a theme, and how to send it to us for processing. This will help us fill all your requests faster!

And everything, as always, will remain free.

Everyone have a safe and happy New Years!

-Eric

Today someone on the Megatronic boards noticed our some design flaws when using the Opera browser. There also appears to be a problem with the new toolbar as well. Thanks for the heads up! We’ve been fixing the problems, and should be done by tomorrow night.

It appears Mac users are still having some long bar issues – this time when using the Safari browser. We’re going to run things through Snugtech’s Safari Test application and get those fixed this week too.

Part of the reason for all these errors is that, until just this month, we haven’t had a template for the pages. Each one has been designed essentially from scratch. We finally got around to setting some standards so that issues like this won’t occur in the future.

When I started this five months ago, it was a small community project. It all began with The Birthday Massacre, followed by Lunarclick and Ever…and since then it’s grown into a monster. We’ve just uploaded our 100th theme – another contribution by Julie Morris!

I can’t thank everyone enough. I had no idea how popular this site would become. We now get well over 7k unique visits a day! Looking back at some of our earlier stuff (like Kill Hannah, for instance) I can really see how much better we’re getting at this. As the demand for new themes has grown higher and higher, we’ve gained some great new designers. A lot of people now have a hand in this site – from the testers, to the review guys, and of course the users. In the last month or two, Julie and Danielle have been doing most of the real design work while I work on code related things like our little ‘toolbar’ (see below). I have to thank everyone who’s been helping. There’s no way we could have gotten so much done these last few months without this kind of group effort.

I did want to say I will eventually get back to doing some of the designs as well. One of the things that has caught me off guard is how difficult retro-fitting all the pages with new technology is now that we’ve got so many. When I add a new patch of code (like our recent Apple+Firefox fix) I literally have to go over hundreds of pages. That can often take a few days, and so I just haven’t had time to design new themes myself. I’m currently the only one working on the backend of the site (the programming and such) so it can get challenging at times. I’m trying to make all the pages more uniform so we can upload them quicker and modify them more easily in the future. That’s why you’ve been seeing all these announcements to ‘refresh/reload’ your page.

We’ve had so much news lately, I haven’t had a change to mention this new ‘toolbar’. Lots of our users have suggested we put links to go back to the preferences, gallery, etc on their start page. We’ve also had a lot of questions about how to set a start page as your homepage. After taking all of these things into consideration, I’ve whipped up a little one-line bar at the top right hand corner of every page. From there you can get to the main site’s most used features. I know it looks small, but it’s going to be helpful to a lot of people (and took quite a while to complete). Phew!

If you enjoy the site, please help by promoting. Thanks again to everyone! We look forward to the next 100 🙂

❤️ Eric

We’ve fixed the long text box issue in the OSX version of Firefox. The patching process was sped up thanks to Jason Lewis (who was kind enough to do extensive testing for us)! The start pages should look fine now. As always, please contact us if you have any issues.

We are aware of the long search box issue that occurs when using Mozilla’s Firefox browser on an Apple computer. One thing we’ve always focused on is keeping the site looking as uniform as possible across several different browsers. For some odd reason, all browsers render the input boxes at different lengths. We try to keep the designs flexible to accommodate these various sizes, but the Mac version of Firefox likes to make them especially long. They usually fly right off the background, and often mess up the entire page layout.

We are fixing this issue! We love Apple, and we love Mozilla. Unfortunately, we don’t have Macs over here. Believe me, we’re designers – we’d love sleek G4s. For now, however, we’re stuck with Windows computers. For this reason, there’s always going to be more bugs in the Mac versions of the site than there are for people looking at it in Windows.

We now have several OSX testers and we’re starting to develop code to patch this long bar issue (and other issues within the site). It may be a few weeks until the patch is fully implemented site wide, but we’re slowly getting there. Stick with us, Apple+Firefox users, we love you!

In celebration of our partnership with KoRnSRC.com as well as the new album (in stores 12.06), AwesomeStart has finally delivered: The Korn Start Page.

Say what you will about these guys, but Korn was a band I grew up with. Follow the Leader was my very first album, and I wouldn’t have ever picked up a seven string guitar had I not heard the low growl of Blind. In fact, I owe my work with The Birthday Massacre and my job with Lunarclick to Korn. Naturally, doing these guys justice was no easy task.

This page is a bit different from our usual designs, and that’s probably going to be the first thing our users notice. After scraping over ten different designs of my own and turning down various submissions, I knew we had to try something else.

How do you please fans of a band that’s produced six albums? Ten years of music? You can’t play favorites here. There was no basing the page on a album as we’ve done in the past. I tried to take a nod from Julie’s popular designs, but I ran into another problem. Last year, Korn’s lineup changed for the first time. With five albums already under their belt, should I include include the classic lineup or support Korn’s new image with the current lineup? And then there was the constant issue of bandwidth and load time. With over a thousand requests for this theme, It promised to be our most taxing page yet.

What I decided on was a simple look, centered around the Korn logo. The colors I used were pulled from the “Here to Stay” video (one of my favorites). TV static has been one of the few constants in Korn’s own desisn, and so I used that idea for the background. I chose to make the logo the focus of the page, so there is no traditional AwesomeStart box and the links are at the bottom of the screen.

Not everyone’s going to like it, but it’s hard to grant a thousand requests with one theme. At the end of the day, our team is satisfied with it.

-Eric

All this messy server moving business is now complete! All the databases (including the request system) are now back online. Thanks to all our users who stuck with us through the downtime and Chris from CKVance for helping us make the move.

Due to the method we used for backing up the old server and moving eveything to the new one, you’ll notice all the “latest themes” features are out of order. This will be corrected as we upload more new themes. In the mean time, enjoy these classic AwesomeStart themes.