I’ve decided I’d write an entry summing up what I learned this year. I basically want to talk about what worked and what didn’t work, and talk a little about what I hope to accomplish in the future. It weird to think back and remember that the main page of this site used to get 1000+ visitors a day. This was of course when I was back in high school, and too apathetic and naive to really appreciate it. Anyways…

Things That Worked:

TAAG: This was the first new program I decided to release on this site. In the beginning it faltered and didn’t get much attention. It was an odd choice as my first new program because I had originally passed on the idea back in 1999 (right after I’d written an AOL Macro Shop – Fallen Legion). However, I had been wanting to create more web-oriented applications, so I thought it’d be a good place to start. During the first few weeks I was actually worried it’d fall into the abyss of the internet and never be seen again. As of this writing it seems to have found an audience, and it’s now by far the most visited page on this site. I attribute the following reasons to why it didn’t fall into the abyss:

• Joining the ASCII Arts Ring & Directory. Yeah, joining a web ring seems pretty amateurish and late 90′s, but I worried that no one would ever see this app so I signed up. The ring only brings in 1 or 2 visitors a day, however, being listed was a huge boon to the page’s search engine ranking. Shortly after joining I started getting 10-20 visitors a day from Google (now that number is 120+).
• Emailing the FIGlet emailing list. FIGlet fonts have an emailing list, I emailed it and told them about the new app. No better way of getting the word out then contacting people who might actually care.
• Changing the default font to something stylish/cool. I noticed that changing TAAG’s default font from “Standard” to “Dancing Font” had an almost immediate effect: people stayed a bit longer to play with the app. I guess this means that making an immediate impression on people is important. If you don’t grab someone’s interest with something cool or stylish, they may not stay long. I’d assume the same goes for interfaces. If your interface sucks, people aren’t going to stick around to see your app, even if it is really cool.
• A “Test All” feature. This was something that’s sort of essential for an app like this, and adding it upped its usage, but it still kind of sucks at the moment. I’m working on a fix to make it faster.
• Other people showing this app to their friends. Someone listed the site on Stumbleupon and over a period of days I got an influx of 600+ visitors. I would not have thought to submit my site there. At the end of the day, I think the only way something can be successful is if other people like it and decide to pass it on.

Color Fader: I’m not sure how to feel about this. I wrote it mostly because someone sent me an email requesting that I post it back up, and when I finally came out with a new version, I hated it. On top of that, the only reason it’s indexed highly on a couple of different search engines is because the old version was so popular (there are even clones of it here and here – though I OKed mostuff’s version back in the day and I think Zak’s version is cool and well designed, both are somewhat flattering, though under normal circumstances I’m not cool with people lifting the source to my pages).

I felt a little silly writing this app, and even sillier supping it up (I recently added a whole bunch of features), but it might as well be a quality app if I’m going to host it here. The biggest thing I learned with this program was that even after all these years, my old files actually still hold a decent page rank in many search engines. I couldn’t even find one new link to my Color Fader until this month. Also, as an aside, the audience for this app is all over the map. There’s actually a cam girl site that links to it, a MMORGB site that links to it, an advice column that mentions it, and it was brought up in some Disney forum for preteens. So I suppose it’s users are a colorful bunch (yeah, that was a pretty crappy pun, I apologize).

Visual Basic Arrays Tutorial [LINK FIXED]: This tutorial was written for this site by the multitalented Chicanerous, back when he was a member of a forum I used to run. I decided to resurrect this gem of a web page after looking through an archived version of this site. The tutorial still held up and it seemed like a terrible thing to waste, so I reposted it. Everyone seems to think static content is dead, but this page has steadily grown in visitors since I posted it up. It now receives 70+ views a day, which is pretty amazing, considering I didn’t do anything to promote it other than mention it in this blog once or twice. With some googling, I even found that it was cited in some university compsci handout, which I thought was cool. I talked with Chic briefly about the tutorial’s gaining popularity and he didn’t seem that interested. He left the programming world a while back, which is a shame, because he was a pretty damn good coder, but oh well.

VB Code Bank: This grabs a lot of odd queries up from search engines. It a reasonably decent resource, I should probably find a way to expand it. The more relevant content this site has, the better.

Reposting Old Apps (Mosaicer and API Spy): Most the links to this site are from sites talking about my free Mosaicer program (and about 50% of the email I get related to this site is from people interested in Mosaicer), which boggles my mind because it’s so old that I’m actually afraid to look at its source code (I wrote it while I was in High School). The API Spy also brings a decent number of people in. It’s sad to think so many people come here for my old stuff, but I suppose that should also be flattering, without those apps, this site would not exist today. One day I’ll update both of them.

Things That Didn’t Work:

Slider Puzzles: Ugh, this kills me. I enjoyed working on this. I really did. It was a spontaneous creation that seemed like it had so much potential, but it now currently get less them one visitor a day. I think it’s biggest problems are:

• Slider puzzles are all over the internet. This app isn’t very unique.
• I didn’t do anything to promote it other than talk about it on this blog.
• The images for the puzzles are old paintings. My old Sarah Michelle Gellar puzzle got a lot of views, but that was mostly because the puzzle was of Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I’m currently working on cleaning up the source code for this app so I can release something others can install on their websites. Maybe someone else in need of some slider puzzle code will have more luck than me. Or maybe they can find a way to creativity build on the app. I’ve briefly entertained the idea of changing from old paintings to Sarah Michelle Gellar or Jessica Alba pics, but copyright issues concern me, and I never seem to hear back from “fan” sites when I email them asking if I can use the images.

The Future / Ambitions

I’m 25, and this coming year I’ll be 26. It’s scary to think I’ll be approaching my 10 year anniversary as a coder. When I started out coding, I learned mostly by reading message board posts on AOL’s add-on development board. It seemed like I learned something everyday. It’s been a long time since I’ve had something like that.

This coming year I hope to be a lot more prolific in my coding and more productive in my learning. I want to write some more web apps as well as get back into writing programs in Visual Basic (I installed Visual Studio 2003 a couple of months ago, but I haven’t used it yet). I have various un-finished projects on my computer, but all of them would take a decent amount of polishing before I posted them up.

New Years

I’ve never really been a fan of New Years. It seems like the kind of day where everyone has to be at a party, and whatever happens, it always tends to be anti-climatic, at least for me. When I was younger, I’d just celebrate by watching MTV’s countdown of the top videos of the year. I kind of miss those days. It seems like everyone feels like they need to do something big for New Years. Last year I didn’t have anything to do up until 5pm. Everyone else seemed to have made plans weeks before hand and my friend and I were just kind of hanging around when his roommate, who had recently been hired as a bouncer at The Guards in DC, made a rather interesting proposal. Apparently some 20-something year old rich girl was holding a private party at his new place of work. Word had it that it was going to be a pretty killer party, and because the guest list was so huge (100+), no one would really notice if a couple of nondescript 20-something’s snuck in (this was later proven true, when I actually met face to face with the rich girl).

So we took the roommate up on his offer and snuck in the backdoor. The party was insane. It was the kind of party that was fully catered, had an open bar, everyone was dressed to kill, beautiful women were everywhere, and a hired photographer was taking pictures of the festivities (somewhere there are some New Years Eve photos with us grinning hysterically). It’s funny, at first we just kind of stood in the corner and tried not to get noticed, but by 10:30 we were shit faced and high fiving random dudes who were probably future high priced lawyers. I even remember being out on the dance floor, which is strange because I can’t dance to save my life.

So anyway, that’s how I started the year. I’m actually thinking I’ll end it on a much quiter note, most likely just hanging out with some friends. Even though that doesn’t make for as good a story, it can still be just as fun.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy News Years!

Hope everyone out there is having a good holiday! Northrop gives me a week and a half break during this time period so I’m pretty ecstatic. Along with visiting with family I’ve been working on some new apps so hopefully some of that will see the light of day at some point.

Anyway, patorjk.com and Pascal (the family dog) wish everyone a good winter break!

As a side note, I’m not the one who dresses up Pascal. He seems to really like it though, I assume it’s because of all the extra attention he gets.

Color Fader Update

I’ve been annoyed at the job I did on my updated color fader since it was released. The interface was squished, awkward and clumsy, the color scheme was bland, and it over all just looked bad. I decided a few days ago to break from what I was doing and work on a re-design of it. I think I’ve come up with something that’s cleaner and easier to work with:

http://patorjk.com/software/colorfader/

The ASCII Art heading is kind of cheesy, but nothing else seemed to fit that heading area and it seemed to fit the ambiance so I left it in. Along with the new design, I added a few new features:

• Vertical text fading: Now you fade lines of text along with fading character by character.
• Multi-color image fade: I always felt it was a HUGE design flaw to have a separate 2-color area for image fading. I’m not sure what I was originally thinking, perhaps I was just lazy.
• Background color selection for text fades: You can now see what the faded text looks like on different colored backgrounds.

Ultra Edit

I’ve been looking around for a good text editor that I can use for development purposes. At the moment, most of what I’m doing is Javascript and PHP. Recently I’ve come across Ultra Edit, which appears to be a pretty snazzy editor. It has syntax highlighting, grep-like searching abilities, a customizable tool bar, line number information, the ability to hide nested code, and lots of other nifty features. It’s only negative is that it’s not free. It’s $50 if I want to use it past the trial period. I’m actually thinking about shelling the doe though, since it would be a big step up from WordPad. Anyone know of any other good Windows text editors I should try before I purchase a license for this one?

Garfield / Realfield

Some clever folks on the internet have discovered that the Garfield cartoon strip is actually pretty funny if you remove all of Garfield’s thought bubbles. It actually works on a whole new level, it’s pretty cool:

• http://blog.org.es/realfield/ - Garfield replaced with a realistic cartoon cat and thought bubbles removed.
• http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4997 - Just the thought bubbles were removed.

Google Ads

I’ve been mulling over the idea of possibly placing a few Google Ads on this website. Nothing crazy or annoying, but something that’d be reasonably discrete and only on a few choice pages. I was doing some calculating and with what I read I could probably make enough a month to cover hosting costs if I placed ads on the Color Fader and the VB Code Bank. I think that would be pretty cool – this site paying for itself.

My fears in doing this though would be that I could scare away visitors or annoy those who regularly visit. Or I could turn off people who think I’m just trying to cash in. So I’d probably only do it in a few select areas, and not in areas that would cause clutter. I dunno, I’ll have to think about it some more, but I just thought I’d give everyone a head’s up.

I’ve come across a rather interesting MySpace phishing technique. Hijacked profiles will send you a link or post a link on your wall telling you to go look at some user’s profile (it’ll usually be done by a friend of your’s). For example, they may say Joe is dead and display the following link to his profile:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=user.viewprofile= 1890000

However, when you click the link, you’ll really be taken to a website like the following:

http://profile.myspace.com.fuseaction.id.user.viewprofile. 1890000.cn/

Notice the “.cn” extension. That site ain’t MySpace. If you follow the above link you’ll see that it takes you to a site that looks just like the MySpace homepage, and it’ll be asking you to log in – even though you should already be logged in. MySpace is kind of crappy in that you have to log in to see certain things, and sometimes you get logged out for various reasons, so most users will gladly re-enter their information.

After you’ve given this phishing site your log in info, it’ll save it and then use it to re-log you in to the real MySpace web site. So you’ll end up back at MySpace, but that interesting thing you were told about isn’t anywhere to be found. I’d assume most users would just shrug this off and move on – totally unaware that they’ve just given their log in information to a phisher/spammer/identity theif/whatever.

This really isn’t anything new, phishing has been around a long time. However, it actually works really well in this scenario, since MySpace used to take you to it’s home page after asking you to log in (even if you just wanted to look at someone’s pictures), and you were sent the link by one of your friends (not by some random dude you know is probably a phisher), so the environment leads to it being a pretty transparent attack. Anyway, it’s important to keep a look out for these kinds of things. A couple of my friends have had their accounts hijacked recently and they weren’t sure how it happened (I haven’t mentioned the above scenario since I just witnessed it recently). You don’t want to get your account or any accounts that may use the same password deleted because some jackass stole your log in info and then spammed a bunch of people.

Things have been going well, though I haven’t gotten any website-related work done in the last week and I’ve been really tired. This past weekend my roommate, his brother, and myself moved most of the essentials into the new appartment, and later today (Wednesday) I get my bed. So I’ll offically be moving in today. We’ve been rather slow about the whole process, but I think it’s mostly because he had to finish his thesis (he defended on the 5th) and I had a bunch of little things I had to take care of.

I hope to have some new stuff up soon, but I don’t want to set any dates since I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to work on things. I still have a lot of new apartment things I need to do.

MySpace.com Search

For a couple of years now I’ve noticed that Google is better at finding myspace profiles than MySpace is. MySpace’s search feature just sucks. I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a MySpace profile search app that uses Google. Something in the same vein as g2p.org. I’m not sure I’ll do it, since it’s not something I do often, but I figured I’d float the idea out here to see if anyone was interested. Facebook has apparently allowed the profiles it stores to be indexed too, however, the search feature on that site is excellent and can’t really be improved on by using Google.

Spammed

This made me smile, well, the post near the bottom by milorad did. A couple of months back I asked the WordPress.com community about a weird Trackback issue I had been having and I ended up with some rather icy responses. I’m glad someone was nice enough to take the time and answer my question. It sucks to think that a certain percentage of my visitors are spam robots, but I guess that happens to every site with a blog and there really isn’t much one can do. Also, I ask you all to please not post in that thread. I don’t want to cause a disturbance or seem like I’m trying to start something. I just wanted to share it here since finding it made my day .