Year: 2005

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!

We’re making the switch to 1.0 a bit early. There’s a few features we know are going to take a big longer to work out, and so here it is – three days ahead of time.

We’ve got two new skins from our Diva series up: Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. We’re currently working on Madonna, Elton John, and more modern day pop stars like Hillary Duff. After that, we’ll be making our final genre move to country/country western. Finally, there’s a brand new Garbage skin from Andi at Zamolxis. This marks Andi’s second contribution, and our third guest skin!

There’s one last bug we need to sort out before our 1.0 launch. It will be up, along with a horde of new skins, on September 1st. In this update, we’re adding a new feature to display the skin you’ve selected on the preferences page. Also, we’re adding a link to each page for our IE users. Clicking the link (found in the upper right hand corner of the page) will save the page as your homepage. It might be a big buggy for the next few days. We appreciate your feedback regarding anything on the site.

Also, there’s a brand new Johnny Hollow skin from Mr. Jason and it’s AWESOME.

30 Seconds to Mars, Tilly and the Wall, The Birthday Massacre, and Kill Hannah have joined the ranks of FluffyStarr and Lunarclick as bands using start pages for their .net and .org domains! After much work, the Radiohead skin is finally available for use. We’re also filling another request with our Aerosmith skin. We’re doing our best to crank these out as quickly as possible!

AwesomeStart is gearing up for it’s 1.0 launch. We just have a few final kinks to work out here. We’ve gone over the code on each start page and added a link to the preferences. If you haven’t set your preferences yet, you will have that option available on the start page. If you’ve already set it, you won’t see it.

New skins for Dr. Dre, Kanye West, and Eminem have been added and the Upcoming Designs have been updated.

New start pages up for The Beatles, Carlos Mencia, Elvis Presley and Damien Rice. We should mention that the Damien Rice skin is our first guest skin and was done by Andi of Zamolxis Design. The preference page has been modified to look cleaner and operate more efficiently. We’re several minor changes away from our v1.0 release, and already have things (like a database/members system for non-cookie users who wish to save their settings) planned for v2.0.

AwesomeStart is now up to 34 skins, several of which (Carlos Mencia, VampireFreaks) are non-music skins. Once we reach 50 music skins, we’re going to start working on movies in addition to music. From there we also play to cover everything from comics to TV shows to books to video games.