Month: August 2006

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!