Year: 2006

First of all, a big thanks to the video podcasters over at CommandN.tv for suggesting AwesomeStart on their show! We’re glad you like it!

Version 3.0 of the site is coming along a lot faster than we thought. The new design has been finalized, and it’s just a matter of coding at this point. The core site is being rewritten from the ground up. Everything will conform to HTML 4.01 and CSS standards to ensure that it looks good in everyone’s browser. Your start page will remain unaffected, so don’t worry.

The next big obstacle is databasing all the themes. AwesomeStart has well over 200 themes, so this could be a lengthy process. Until the site is complete, new themes are going to go on hold; we’re focusing 100% of our efforts on getting 3.0 built and online. It looks like the new site may launch as early as next month!

We’re beginning to work on version 3.0 of the site. With our one year anniversary only three months away, we’ve decided to give the site one last major overhaul this year. With any luck, the launch of version 3.0 will take place on August 1st. We’re still in the draft phases, so this date may change.

What’s in store for the new version? Where the 2.0 launch was more about start page technologies, this update will focus on changes to the core site. As mentioned previously, we are going to database our themes as well as the theme search. We’ll be giving the site a slicker “Web 2.0” look, and integrating RSS as well. The RSS feed will let people know when there’s a new developer’s log or when new themes have been added. If you have any other suggestions for the new version of the site, please contact us! Stay tuned for futher updates on our progress.

We’ve added some code to each start page so it will auto focus on the search box. While this is a small update, it affects nearly 80% of the pages on the server. Now, when your start page loads, the cursor will already be in the search box. You can even type the URL in there instead of the browser, if you’d like. Just open your browser, type a search string, and hit enter! We believe this will make your browsing experience a little bit better. If you’re having any problems with your start page or there appears to be any errors, please contact us so we can fix it.

We’ve been going over any pages that use span tags and swapping them out in favor of CSS. These additions only affect several pages, but they should make the pages load faster and look better. Any quirks associated with the mouseovers on links should now be gone. We’ve also fixed a few pages that loaded funny in the Opera browser. As always, please contact us if you have any problems.

Right now, we use a combination of some php and the site’s folder structure to index start pages. This method makes the site very speedy, and avoids any possible MySQL errors from occurring. The downside is that this process makes adding pages to the site a very lengthy process. Using MySQL is an alternative we’re going to be considering over the next few weeks.

After many many requests, we’ve created a new category of AwesomeStart themes: video games! Our first two (Doom and Kingdom Hearts) were designed by Eric. The Xbox 360 theme has also been moved into the video game section. When the new Playstation and Nintendo systems are available, they will receive themes as well.

Our next video game theme will be Perfect Dark. We’re currently looking for video game theme requests, so feel free to browse over to the request form and let us know what you’d like to see.

Since we first started offering custom links on start pages over seven months ago we’ve had an issue for users who forgot the “http” in their links. We’ve upgraded our preference system to automatically add the prefix for all custom URLs that begin with “www.” This fix, however, will only affect newly saved preferences. If you’ve been experiencing custom link 404 issues, you should go to the preferences page, scroll to the bottom, and click the “Save Preferences” button. That should take care of everything!

After months of silence, Danielle has released two new creepy movie themes for you: the first is for the new movie V for Vendetta, and the second isn’t even out yet! Silent Hill looks fantastic, but I’m probably going to be too scared to see it. 🙂 We also have an old Silent Hill video game theme which may make it’s way into a new section of the site very soon.

The Lost theme is quickly sneaking it’s way up in our top four. This TV thing was a great idea, and we want to thank everyone for emailing us about it. We sould be uploading more themes for your favorite shows soon!

We’ve been getting a lot of requests for TV themes latley, and our first one is now online – Penn and Teller’s Showtime Show (which we won’t say the name of) is now up. For the time being, we’re going to keep our TV themes mixed with our Movie themes. This might change as time goes on and we add more. For now, that’s where you’ll find them.

Coming up next are themes for Arrested Development, Lost, and the Sopranos. We’re not taking requests for themes just yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get there. Our theme request system is a little backed up, so you may not see your request on the page yet. Don’t worry though, we got it and we’re working on it.

Other new themes today include Maximo Park and UltraViolet. Not sure if UltraViolet is any good yet, but we’re all big comic book fans so we’re pretty sure we’ll like it.

Stay tuned!

We’re just going to come right out and say it; AwesomeStart.com has been renewed until 2016 – for ten more years!

Most of you in the United States, Europe, and seemingly every other place but Canada (how odd) experienced some downtime yesterday. We previously promised the end of downtime, and we did fix the bulk of that problem when we switched servers. For those of you interested in the technical end of it: Our old host still had control over our DNS for the .com, and a recent issue over there caused it to accidentally revert to their servers. After a few phone calls, it’s synchronized with our new hostingplex servers once again. To prevent this issue in the future, we’ve transfered the domain into our name so this will not happen again!

So why ten more years? Well, we wanted people to know we’re here to stay. AwesomeStart is going to get bigger and bigger every day. We’re constantly gaining new users, new designers, and more attention. We really love doing this site, and we wanted to promise our users that it’s going to stay here. You’ll never type in AwesomeStart.com and see one of those flakey, owner-must-have-forgot-to-renew-and-now-someone-else-stole-their-domain pages here.

There’s some other stuff going on, but back to work for now. More updates all this week!

Eric’s big project, TBMChicago.com is now complete. This means new themes will be back on fulltime. We’ve got a bunch of new designs completed, so expect a new one every day this week!

Earlier in the week we posted an message regarding our search for new designers. For anyone interested in contributing: We’ll be bringing you information on that shortly. We’re currently reviewing everyone’s porfolio. Hang tight!