Year: 2006

After months and months of coding and redesign, we’ve finally put the RSS feature online. You can now replace the generic two sentence blurb in the middle of your page with any xml feed!
If you haven’t heard of RSS, you’re not alone. RSS has been around for some time, but has just recently started to become popular. The new RSS system is a simple but powerful feature that allows users to subscribe to a newsfeed or podcast listed in the preferences – or enter one from another site.

Selecting an RSS feed will allow you to get the latest news or content delivered right to your start page. Each time a new item on the feed is updated, the paragraph of information on your page will update as well. If CNN posts a new story, it shows up on your start page. If Ask a Ninja posts a new podcast, you’ll be the first to know.

This is the first of several new features finally making their way onto the preferences panel. For a while, we considered having an “advanced” preferences panel so as not to confuse users who just wanted the basic functions. Rather than switching back and forth however, we’ve come up with a more simple solution.

Advanced settings are going to appear on the right hand side in a special box, and you’re going to have the ability to add or subtract them from your preferences panel. By default, the new RSS feature will be turned off. If you’d like to add that option to your preferences, you can click the link in the right hand menu. As new features are added, you’ll also have the ability to go to your preferences and add them. We have two or three more major things we’ve already started working on. Keep checking the DevLog for details.

Ironically, if you want all the latest DevLog details delivered to your start page, you should probably NOT use the new RSS feature. We’ll still be updating the default two sentence blurb on a regular basis.

UPDATE: Tonight we updated the default announce paragraph to randomize messages. There’s currently seven of them, covering the various features of the site. We didn’t want non-RSS users to feel left out of today’s update!

AwesomeStart is now running on brand new, shiny, expensive GoDaddy servers. The move took place yesterday, and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. This will hopefully put an end to all the downtime we were having last month. Thanks again for sticking with us as we made this move!

In the last DevLog we mentioned getting the RSS up before we moved the servers, but we were having so much trouble with outages that the move became the top priority. We’re still working on RSS implementation, and hope to have it done by the end of the month. Currently, we’re looking for a way to fit the feature into the preferences panel. We want that page to remain simple and uncluttered, but as the site grows it’s starting to get pretty full.

One option under consideration is an “advanced” preferences panel – it would allow more “advanced” users to go to a separate page to change even more things on their theme – add more links, add a feed, etc. There’s lots of ideas floating around right now, and it’s really just a matter of trail and error until we find the one that fits.

We’re working on some fantastic new features, but before we get to that, we should talk about the server updates.

We’re aiming to move the site to a new server by the end of October. As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been having some trouble with our current Hostingplex server. The new server guarantees 99.9% uptime, and should be a little faster too. We’ll have an update when we know the exact time of the move.

We’re been getting your emails, and lately everyone seems to want the same thing: more links and RSS feeds! The links are going to require a bit of a major patch to all pages, so the RSS feeds are going to come first.

This is what the current test implementation looks like, and is probably very close to the final v1.0 product. You’ll be able to check a box in your preferences to put a feed on your page in place of where the AwesomeStart blurb currently is. If you chose not to check that box, your page will remain how it is now. Eric and Greg have been working on adding several more features, but those probably won’t make this release. Adding RSS to these pages has proven to be more difficult than any of us every thought.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, it’s fairly simple. An RSS feed is simple a way to gain access to the latest news or updates of a site. If a site has RSS, then you’ll be able to get the latest news updates, podcasts, torrents, or even blog entries delivered right to your page. The above example is from the Skepticality podcast. Every time they post a new podcast, that paragraph gets updated on your start page with a link to it as well as a little note regarding it’s contents. Most sites with regularly updated content have an RSS feed – just look on the site, or try Googling the site’s name along with RSS.

The current version does not have support for html tags or images within the feed. Also, it will only display the latest feed. We’re looking to change it to implement these features as well as the iTunes RSS tag for podcasts. Whether these items make the first release or not, the RSS feature should go online before the end of the month.

If you’ve been experiencing problems with your start page – particularly network connection errors, page not found, or down time – please contact us to let us know.

Nearly a year ago, we switched our web host from CKVance to Hostingplex to alleviate downtime. Recently, we may have been experiencing a bit of downtime with Hostingplex and are considering switching hosts once again. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know!

One full year ago today, AwesomeStart.com v1.0 first appeared online. At that time we had only a handful of themes, and they were all done by the same artist. Just twelve months later, we now have 300 themes designed by 32 different artists.

When that first theme went up, I really had no idea how rapidly the site would grow. We’ve seen mentions on IGN, Digg, eBaum’s World, commandN, and various other popular sites. We now have over 100,000 users and have climbed well into the Alexa Top 50,000 websites. Since this time last year, AwesomeStart (now in version 3.0) has been completely rebuilt from the ground up – and additional technology is being added all the time. We really have come a long way.

This is just the beginning. Now that the bugs are finally being ironed out of the request system, we’re able to deliver the most requested themes faster than ever before. We’ve got several new start page categories underway, and are still working on added an advanced preferences page.

I really can’t thank all our users enough for getting the word out about this site. Through promotion we’ve expanded the site far beyond where I ever though it would go. Just imagine where we could be a year from now! Thanks again everybody 👍🏻

-Eric

Take a second and mention our birthday on your blog or myspace – it means the world to us!

We’ve fixed a problem with search results. Themes made within the last month were not showing up in the results. This was a small issue with the way themes were databased, and has been fixed. Go poke around the search page and see if you can find something new.

AwesomeStart programming and data design has made it’s full move to Apple’s Tiger OS X operating system! We’ve been moving bits of the design and uploading process to the Mac in recent months, and are happy to report we’re now up 100%. Recent design and upload times have show a drastic increase in speed. What does this mean for you? More themes, of course!

Our one year anniversary is right around the corner. The domain originally went online on the 12th, and version 1.0 went up the 29th. The site has come a long way!

We’ve been going through our logs, trying to weed out every last “Page Not Found” error. We have some strange entries in the log with a specific onClick statment in the band directory. Here’s an example of one that appears in the Mars Volta directory:

/marsvolta/\\\”onClick=\\\”style.behavior=’url(

None of our programmers seem to be able to find any reason for this code appearing on any of the pages. If you’re encountering any errors, as always, let us know!

After toying around with several methods, we’ve finally implemented a major patch to the site. This code should fix nearly every broken link problem involving custom links. These problems occurred when users forgot to start a link with http://. As a result, their links to external sites did not function properly. We’ve come up with a fix, and manually added it to each start page. The pages should load just as fast, and the major link issues should be taken care of.

Our request system seems to be holding up pretty well. Keep those requests coming! We want to know what themes you want to see on the site!

We’ve got a new template for start pages, and we’re slowly redoing old pages with the template. It makes further use of CSS to decrease load time, and also conforms to traditional html 4.01 standards. This change is minor, and should not affect our users in any way.

One final edit for the night: AwesomeStart’s error pages have been upgraded with the new 3.0 design. This is the last of them! Every page has now been updated. On to that advanced preferences menu.

The new version of the site is finally online. Besides a new design and various code validations, we’ve got a bunch of new features. The biggest addition is the new search technology. This allows you to use the search box in the upper right hand corner of each page to search for start page themes. We’re still perfecting the search, so if you search for a page you know we have and it doesn’t show up, please let us know.

We’ve made a database of every theme, and you can see this technology at work all across the site. First, the start page gallery now shows ALL THEMES by default. You can narrow down your browsing by Music, Movie and TV, Videogames, and Other. The revamped staff page also uses this database technology to display the number of themes and additional information about our designers.

Our main page now displays the top eight most used themes. Additionally, we’ve added a new request system that totals the number of times a theme has been requested. This will allow our designers to add the most desired themes to the site the fastest.

Our Developer’s Log has also been given an update. There is now a permalink to every entry (in the odd case that you might want to link to it for some reason!) You can also browse entries as far back as day 1. There are a few features, as we mentioned in the last devlog, that didn’t make this release. We’re still actively working on them. They should be up (along with a batch of new themes) very shortly. We’d love to hear your feedback.

New features for the upcoming 3.0 launch have already begun popping up on the site. Aside from the new navbar above all the core pages, we’ve also integrated the gallery database into the preferences page. AwesomeStart now has support for A9’s siteinfo.xml and a standard robots.txt file. These last two tweaks won’t mean much to our end users, but are important technologies we though we should support.

We’re gotten a lot accomplished in the last few weeks. The brand new request system is done, and we’re pretty proud of it. We’ve finished redesigning all the main pages, and we’re rewritten the design page to include more details. We’ll elaborate on all these new features once the site goes online. There are still several major sections being worked on. With the help of Greg Sidelnikov the new theme search should be complete at some point today or tomorrow. We’re also working on a new way to make start pages your homepage, and possibly an RSS feed.

We’ve gotten a lot of requests recently for additional custom links as well as an extended domain search (also covering functionality like “Search Pages from the UK”). We play to include these ideas in the site, and were really hoping the advanced preferences menu would make this 3.0 release. Given the amount of time the site has taken so far, we’re not sure if that’s going to happen. Our major concern is getting the site up so we can get back to putting out new themes. Anything that doesn’t make this release will most likely follow shortly. Stay tuned!