Today is a sad day; I‘ve decided to archive the beloved Awesome Box. Why, you may ask? The short answer: support and upkeep. It‘s difficult to continue to support a plugin and respond to problems people are have using it. The long answer…

Awesome Box was a fun project that I started back in 2006 as a way to start learning Javascript. I needed to use Yahoo! UI on a few sites and the client also wanted to use a image slideshow/popup tool. You can imagine my hesitation to put multiple Javascript libraries on a site when it really wasn‘t necessary. So, thus began Awesome Box.

I only completely rewrote the script once, after I learned the err of my ways from the first time around. It was actually a lot of fun to see what I had done wrong and laugh at my foolishness. But I kept adding features, comparing it to other scripts available and trying to keep up with the competition.

Competition is great, but it‘s a lot of work.

Then came the side jobs writing custom image slideshow scripts. I actually enjoyed doing them. The clients were knowledgeable and easy to work with, but it was time consuming and draining while still working a 40-60 hour work week at my day job.

And last came support. I guess that I learned the hard way that when something is popular, people are bound to have problems (no matter how bulletproof you thought your work was).

It‘s just hard to keep up. I haven‘t updated the script since July. It still works great, so if you still need it or would like to use it or hack it apart, feel free to do so! It‘s still available here.

If you‘d like something still kept up and being supported, you can try one of the other similar scripts that I know of that are available, in no particular order:

• Lightbox
• Thickbox
• Facebox
• Shadowbox
• LightWindow