Year End Review: The patorjk.com Comeback

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!

10 thoughts on “Year End Review: The patorjk.com Comeback”

  1. I think you are probably right about first impressions. When I used TAAG a few days ago to generate some ASCII art for a “ReadMe” file I immediately noticed the fact it was on a different font, and thought, “This one looks pretty cool!”

  2. hehe, thanks for further confirming that for me. I can actually track how often people change fonts because each font change causes a hit to the getFontInfo.php file. I actually wondered if the Standard font wasn’t impressing enough people so I changed it to the Dancing Font. The next day I noticed an increase in the number of hits to getFontInfo.php, and it stayed that way. I was kind of shocked that it made such a difference.

  3. I always hate it when I put a lot of effort in to something and no one gives a crap about it. But I guess the important thing is that you’re happy with it the way it is. If other people like it, that’s just a plus.

    It’s weird that people still talk about (and presumably use) the API spy. Could it really still be useful?

    It’s cool that you’re gonna get back in to Windows programming. Don’t forget that you can get the express editions of visual studio for free now.

  4. As of this writing, it’s had 15 downloads this month (over the last 2.5 days). I’m not sure who uses it. I use it every so often when I need some VB6 work done. I actually think the audience for VB6 is grossly underestimated. Though I know some people use it because it can do things like “hide windows” or “enable disabled objects”. I actually thought about writing a program specifically for doing things like that, but I’ve been side tracked.

    I’ll have to look into the Express Editions of Visual Studio. I have version 2003, but I’m not sure if I want to start there since it’s already a little dated.

  5. I’ve read the newest version of Visual Studio is due out sometime during the summer, but for now I’ll stick with 2005. Although it has many handy features, and supports Regular Expressions better than Visual Basic 6 I find that the code runs a lot slower, and I’m still not sure how to create simultaneous connections like using an array of Winsock controls.

  6. I had to use VB.NET 2k3 for a class and I found it to be much more verbose than C#. Or at least that’s what it felt like.

    But, other than syntax, there’s no difference between the managed .net languages. They all produce the same output. C++ is still my favorite for unmanaged code out of the .net languages. It’s kind of ugly with managed code.

  7. It seems kind of odd that you’d have a suite of languages and the only difference would be syntax. Good to know though. I’ll probably check out both C# and VB and just go with whatever one is easiest to write.

  8. Sorry I’m not too keen on the subject, but wasn’t that what the purpose of the .NET framework was? I thought it was for having multiple languages that could easily produce the same results, using similar syntax, which could be applied to any of the other languages in the suite.

  9. Possibly, I haven’t really kept up with the .NET stuff. Though I know when I pick a language it’s usually because it provides some type of advantage over another language. There are things I can do in Tcl that I can’t do in VB and vice versa. Sometimes speed of execution is an issue, sometimes I just want to whip up something really quickly, etc etc.

    If all languages had the same features and pros/cons, and the only difference was syntax, I’m not sure there’d be a good reason to use than one of them.

    I did a little more digging and it looks like most sites say syntax is the main difference (though C# has features that are difficult to do in VB.NET). However, someone ran some tests and it looks like there are speed differences in the code that’s generated:

    http://www.osnews.com/story.php/5602/Nine-Language-Performance-Round-up-Benchmarking-Math-and-File-IO//page3

    I’m guessing they still have multiple languages so C/C++ programmers and VB programmers don’t have to learn a completely new syntax to pick up the .NET language. It makes since from a marketing perspective, but it seems a little odd.

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