Visits were up for the month of July, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s certainly encouraging! Thanks to all of you who come here, it motivates me to keep working on this site. As far as stats go, I’ve actually sort of been wondering how to best promote this site. Towards the end of the month I realized I hadn’t submitted this site to any search engines, so I did that. However, I was listed on most of them already, so I’m assuming manually submitting a site doesn’t do a whole lot. I did find some interesting web tools available from google though:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

If you have a website you may want to check that out. It’ll give you interesting information about how your site is ranked in their search engine. Stuff like your highest ranked page, sites that point to you that count in your page rank, when the last time your page was crawled, and a couple of other things. Anyway, here are the stats…

July Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 120.94
Total Number of Visitors: 3749
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 2.91 GB

June Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 84.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2520
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 547.01 MB

I was one of those people who waited out side the book store in a long line, right before midnight, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was released. The atmosphere was great: There were people in costumes (one group showed up dressed as jedis – which made no sense), lots of excited people, and lots of cute girls. I was actually pretty astonished. There are a lot of cute girls that read the Harry Potter books.

It was kind of odd for me to be there though, I felt sort of like a charlatan since I was only 100 pages into the fourth book (even now I’m still on the fourth book). I was picking up my mom’s reserved copy though, and I couldn’t resist the idea of a midnight book release. It seemed like a fun thing to be a part of.

Anyway, it’s that time of year again. Since this is the final book, I knew it’d be bigger and there’d be more crazy stuff going on. But unfortunately for me, it wasn’t to be. I’ve been sick as hell the past 3 days, and right now my throat hurts so much that I can barely talk. So I had to pass on the opportunity to check out the madness. My brother did drive by one of the local book stores though, about 15-30 minutes prior to midnight, just to see what was up. Here are some pics from the front lines:

I feel sorry for the people who work at the book store.

On an unrelated note, I’ve changed the root directory of this site – patorjk.com – so that it’s a frame that points to this page. I felt this was better than having a crappy looking page redirect you here. A brief check out of things seems to indicate that all is well. Let me know if you have any problems though. It’s actually a frameset with only one frame object in it. I had no idea you could do that until I tested it out (on IE and Firefox).

I’ve added a few things from my previous site:

• Visual Basic Arrays Tutorial by Adam Wehmann – An array tutorial that covers the basics of arrays and how you use them in VB.
• API Spy Tutorial by Digial Rampage – Wonder what an API Spy is and how to use it? This is a short and simple tutorial that’ll cover what you need to know.
• Mosaic Gallery – A collection of mosaics generated by Mosaicer 2.0.

Basically, two programming related tutorials that were written for this site and a gallery of mosaics. I think I want my programming section to consist of just tutorials this time, instead of downloadable examples. Well, I may do a little of both, but tutorials appeal a lot more to me. And for the moment being, I’m not taking any submissions, even though I’ve had a few people offer to write examples. Somewhere inside of me there is a Regular Expressions tutorial, but I want to wait a while, and I need to think up some really good examples for it. In school when I was taught about regular expressions, they were presented in the most boring way possible and we were shown no real world application of them. It was only recently that I re-discovered them and realized how great they really were.

I’ve stopped doing Spot Lighted Site posts and no one has called me on it. Not that I’d think any of you would lose any sleep over it, I felt kind of corny doing a weekly feature like that anyway. From now on I’m only going to sporadically feature a site or an article, since a lot of “Spot Lighted” posts might clutter up the main page and make it harder for people to find the real news. I’m also kind of torn on what kind of sites to feature. In the past I’ve featured some completely non-programming related sites like antigirl.com and sullen (now defunct), but it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense for me to do that. I think I want to keep this site mostly on focus – though deviations from time to time are good. So I guess with all this rambling what I’m trying to say is that there’ll be less Spot Lighted Sites (like what’s been happening for the past month), and when something is talked about, it’ll hopefully have some kind of interest to the people who come here.

I’m a big fan of stats and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. At the end of the day, it appears that TAAG was a worth while program to write. Hopefully I can continue to think up new stuff that will be interesting for people to check out. My end of the year goal is to be getting 500+ visitors a day. However, that may be a pie in the sky dream because even if I kept increasing my visitor count by  18.3%, I wouldn’t make that goal.

Also, based on the search engine results, I think I can conclude that google is awesome.

June Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 84.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2520
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 547.01 MB

May Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 71.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2201
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 154.19 MB

I had this big long journal entry in my head that I wanted to write, but at the moment I’m completely exhausted, so I’ll just give you the basic talking points:

* TAAG has had some major updates
– 11 New AOL fonts were added
– The code was optimized a bit, so it should run faster
– A preview page has been fully constructed with all of the fonts. Lets me know how this looks. I plan to spruce it up a little and maybe add a few more features in.

* I’ve been thinking it’s time to move onto my next application. I’ve got 2 ideas in mind that I want to implement. One is something easy that someone suggested through email, and the other would take a little bit of research and a little more time. Both would be online apps.

* I’ll probably be buying a new car within the next two weeks (maybe even on Sunday). My current plan is to get a Tiburon. I know it doesn’t have the highest ratings in everything (though it has gotten decent ratings and all the reviews I read were positive), but it looks awesome – yes, not a reason one should buy a car, but it’d be nice to drive something that actually looked cool.

TAAG

Big updates coming for the TAAG program. On Sunday, I hope to have the following:

– 100+ new fonts uploaded
– A preview page that will show you all of the fonts

Pic to HTML

One of ideas I’ve been toying with for a future project is a Pic to HTML program. This appeals to me mostly because I made one way back in the day and have lately had a few requests for it, I have a few new ideas that I think would make it worth writing, and because it would sort of compliment the TAAG program. I was thinking of making it an online web app, so I decided to survey what else was out there. One of the apps I saw had a disclaimer from the author, saying you had to login before you made anything. This was because someone was apparently uploading gross/illegal images to his server.

I would assume, and I may be wrong on this, that he knew the images were gross/illegal because he was logging what images people used in his program. Though he did later say he wasn’t doing this, so I’m not sure how he knew. However, this did give me some pause. I guess I’m naive, but using these web applications I would assume everything I do is private, however, this is most likely not the case in every web app. When the app isn’t on your computer, you don’t really control where the data goes. Hell, someone could write an online app and then funnel all your data to some marketing firm or use it to spy on you.

These ideas kind of creeped me out, and made me realize why online apps probably aren’t more popular. So if I do decide to make a Pic to HTML program, I’ll probably make 2 versions – one you can download, and one you can use online. Though I promise you all that I’d never log any info you inputted into one of my programs. However, we’re talking about weeks from now (hell, TAAG isn’t even done yet), and I have some other ideas I’m playing around with, so at this point in time, I don’t know what my next project will be.

Fourm

On my stats page I’m noticing I’m getting around 20 hits a month to http://forum.patorjk.com. I’m not sure if there’s a link somewhere on the web pointing to that, or if people are checking to see if the message board still exists, but there are no forums on this site. At the current moment I’m averaging 70-something hits a day (though the past few days I’ve been getting 100+ visitors, which has been cool). I have no plans on bringing the forums back until I’m getting 500+ visits a day, and even then I’ll have to think about it. I did really like the community this site once had, but you can’t grow something like that overnight, and I don’t want them to be a ghost town (what they ended up turning into the past few years).

Blogroll

Are there any likeminded sites out there? In the past, I felt like I was part of a community of sites, these days, I sort of feel like I’m out on my own. Like I pointed out a while ago, a lot of my previous contemporaries have either abandoned their sites or gone on to other things. Hell, I don’t regularly visit many programming sites / blogs anymore. I feel like I should be though. I was linking to my (real life) friend David’s site, but he hasn’t updated it in 7 months and it’s mostly just for his personal photos anyway.

Alas, I was unable to finish my updates to the TAAG program. I’ll shoot for this weekend.

New York was a lot of fun. Unfortunately my camera broke, however, my friends took lots of pictures. I may edit this post later with one or two of them.

Edit: Eh, I’ll just link by buddy’s flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamstuffed

I’m the guy in the Radiohead t-shirt.