Developers Log

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!

Our first new theme of 2006 – A theme for March of the Penguins – is now online. This marks the end of our winter hiatus. All of our designers are hard at work, and we will be bringing new themes every day this week.

Our staff is going through the emails we recieved in our off time, so if you’re waiting for a response it should only be a few more days. As always, you can contact us using the contact page.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy new year. We’ll be uploading more new themes starting January 19th. Until then, feel free to browse around the gallery and find something new.

For the fist time in six months, My Chemical Romance has been overthrown in the AwesomeStart top four! Looks like Panic! at the Disco is now the most popular theme on the site. Way to go, P!atD fans!

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