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.
There are a lot of free text editors for Windows.
I’m using jEdit right now. It’s decent, but it is java, so it’s slow to start up and just kills memory.
Vim/Cream is pretty good. Cream is kinda sluggish. Vim by itself is kinda primitive.
Komodo Edit is good if you need an IDE more or less. But it’s a little more than lightweight.
Wikipedia has a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors
But if you like UltraEdit and think it’s worth $50, go for it.
As far as advertisements go Google Adsense, and things along those line aren’t too intrusive. Interstitial ads are what really turn people off so steer clear of those unless that’s what you want to do.
sloat – Free is always preferable, though I want something I trust, so I’m always a little skeptical about some of these free programs (spyware, ads, etc). Thanks for the wikipedia link and recommendations, I’ll look into some of those.
Awesome AnDrEw – Interstitial ads bug the crap about of me, same with pop ups and ads that make sound. I wouldn’t want to annoy any of my visitors which is why I would only really consider something like Google Ads. I’d have to find a way to do it so it’d look nice too, so I’m not even sure if I’ll do it.
Well done. I expected it to be an image of text but it’s actual text which is useful.
Thanks. Color faded text used to be popular in AOL chat rooms. When over used it becomes kind of cheesy, but it can look good if used in the right places.
If you don’t mind some bloat, eclipse has plugins for just about any language–I checked, and it does have them for js and php.
UltraEdit does have the advantage of being a stream editor, but it can’t come close to providing the kind of nice happy editing capabilities that an IDE has…..
And I don’t know how large the files you’re handling are going to be–probably not that big since you’ll be writing them yourself–so the advantage of Ultra Edit being a stream editor is kind of a non-advantage.
It does write/read/convert amoung many file formats though.
On your suggestion I just downloaded Eclipse and have been playing around a bit. So far I’m having a little trouble getting it to open PHP files (I’m currently downloading some more updates for it though), thanks for the suggestion!
Eclipse was one of the possible editors I could have used at an old job of mine, but I never tried it out. Instead I stuck to nedit. Now I kind of wish I’d taken the time to acquaint myself with it some, but oh well.
At this writing, the only knowledge I have of the program comes from Steve Yegge’s occasional unflattering jabs (“Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch”):
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/steveys-tech-news-issue-1.html
Many people now use Fire Fox as their choice of browser because of the ad ons. With FF they have the ad blocker, so most wouldn’t even see it. Don’t know if you get credit for it though.
Nope, I only get credit if they’re clicked. And in the case of referrals, I only get credit if the program is installed. According to my stats, a huge chunk of my audience uses FF, and I’d assume many of those user’s have the ad block plug in installed. Personally, I don’t mind at all. This site isn’t about making money and I don’t want ads to clutter up the place and make it look bad. If they bring in something, it’d be nice, but I don’t have high expectations.