Right now my plan is to make patrickgillespie.com a depot for random projects and ideas. I was thinking that it might make sense to move some of my more random content (the miscellaneous section and Javascript games) this new site. That’d allow me to narrow the focus here to tools and programming.

For this new site’s interface, the main idea I was throwing around in my head was for the user to see a bunch of images floating through space. Each image would represent a piece of content and none of the content would be related. The idea would be that this was just a bunch of random stuff floating through cyberspace.

I whipped up a quick prototype using Van Halen album covers, which you can see by clicking the above link, and was unimpressed with the outcome. The movement ended up being pretty jumpy, and I’m not sure I like how the images just disappear when they “hit the screen” (when they do that they’re reset to way back in the distance). I’m starting to think that this kind of stuff is best left to Flash. There’s also some other issues, but since this is just a prototype I didn’t bother with certain details.

Right now I’m thinking of stealing my slider puzzle’s interface for patrickgillespie.com since I liked how that came out and nobody ever uses that thing anyway.

I’ve had a hectic past few weeks. Not the normal kind of “oh man I’m stressed”, but the “holy shit I’m stressed” kind of weeks. Things appear to be calming down now though. I’ve been thinking about new things I can do for this site, but all I’ve got so far are a bunch of half finished ideas and projects. Things coming in the near future (next month or so): A new version of the Image Color Palette Generator, the source code to that project, and a rough draft of patrickgillespie.com. The patrickgillespie.com project is the most fun, so that may be out first.

Web App URLs

I’ve decided to change the URLs to my web apps so that they are one level down. Basically, I think having someone type “patorjk.com/software/taag” is a little much. It’s easier to remember “patorjk.com/taag”. The “software” text doesn’t really add much value. I haven’t moved them all yet, and when I do I’ll 301 redirect the old links, but I figured I’d let people know my reasoning for doing this.

Exits

Months ago I removed my links page. I did this because I was replacing it with the links you see in the left panel under the headings “Interesting Blog Links” and “Programming/Hacking Links”. I’ve now decided that it was a mistake to do this. I’m going to keep the links in the left hand panel, but I’m also going to add the links page back in. It will now be called “Exits“. I haven’t had time to fully populate this page, but you can expect the Exits page to grow over the next few weeks. In the mean time, if you’re bored, here are some amusing sites to waste your time with:

Where is Bob? Tales of an Absentee Manager - A really funny blog about a manager named Bob who terrorizes his IT employees. I get the feeling this is fiction, but it’s still a fun read.

The Trolls Among Us - One of the most fascinating articles I’ve read in recent memory. A reporter dives down into the world of internet trolls.

Lately I’ve been exchanging riddles / mind puzzles with some coworkers of mine. I’m not really sure how it started, but one ended up on my white board at work and before I knew it everyone wanted to know the answer or had their own riddle to challenge me with. I’ve collected up some of my favorites. If you’re unfamiliar with one and you solve it, feel free to post your proposed solution as a comment.

As far as site updates go, I have some coming, but I’ve had a distracting past couple of weeks. Since January I’ve been suffering from tinnitus (ringing in the ears), but it didn’t really get bothersome until the middle of last month. I ended up going on a huge research quest for a cure, but it appears there are only things you can take to prevent tinnitus (NAC, antioxidants) and nothing that’ll really cure it. Right now it’s at a volume I can deal with, so I’m fine, but I want to caution everyone and let you know its important to take care of your hearing. Also, avoid things that are too good to be true. There seems to be a lot of snake oil out there when it comes to tinnitus.

Anyway, enough of my personal problems, on with the riddles…

1) In front of you there are ten boxes of books and a digital scale large enough and strong enough to hold all of the boxes when they’re filled with books. Inside of each box is ten books. In nine of the boxes, the books weigh 1.0 pounds each. In one of the boxes the books weigh 0.9 pounds each. Using the digital scale only once, how do you determine the box that contains the books that weigh 0.9 pounds? You may take the books out of the boxes and you can assume the weight of each box is 1 pound.

2) You’re one an island and you want to get off of it. There are two caves off the island. One leads to certain doom while the other leads off the island. In front of the caves there are two guards. One always tells the truth and the other always lies. You do not know which one is which. You may ask one question which they both will answer. What question can you ask that will guarantee you pick the right cave to get off of the island? [Editors Note: After much discussion, we discovered there were actually multiple answers to this question, so if you know the answer, try to come up with another one]

3) Four men are standing in a row. They are ordered tallest to shortest. The tallest man is facing west while the other three men are facing east. Each man is wearing a hat that is either black or white. Each man knows that there are 2 black hats and 2 white hats, however, they do not know the color of the hat that they are wearing. The tallest man cannot see anyone’s hat, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the two men in front of him, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the man in front of him, and the shortest man can see no one’s hat color. Imagine that the hat ordering from tallest to shortest is: black, white, black, white. Where the tallest person is wearing a black hat and the shortest person is wearing a white hat.

None of these men can move around, however, they can talk to each other - though they do not have to be truthful when answering each other’s questions. As soon as a man figures out his hat color he screams it out (and he cannot scream unless he really knows his hat color). Which man can figure out his hat color and why? [Editors Note: This one is easier if you draw it]

4) You have 25 runners. When raced, they always perform the same, and no two runners perform identically. You can only race 5 at a time, and once a race is over, the only information you get is the order that they finished in. How do you determine the fastest, second fastest, and third fastest runner using only seven races?

5) This was the puzzle that started it all. No one I’ve told it to has been able to figure it out. And it always takes a while for the answer to make sense.

Not many people search for the phrase “Patrick Gillespie”, but those who do find that the first listing is a short little article about Patrick Gillespie failing to register as a sex offender. Once you read it you can see that it’s not about me, however, I feel like my name is being sullied by these crappy Google results. A few girls I’ve dated have even brought it up, usually just to make a joke, but it does solidify my concern that people find information about us by Googling us, and if someone is searching for me, I don’t want their first thought to be “Is this guy a sex offender?”

Today I’ve taken an interesting step in trying to rectify this situation. I was notified by a fellow commenter at seomoz.org that patrickgillespie.com was available for purchase. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this domain available, in fact it just went back on the market around 30 days ago. I think for the past 10 years or so some realtor has had it, or maybe someone just had it parked, either way, it wasn’t very popular or memorable in its previous form. Part of me wonders if the owner let it expire by accident, but I guess that sucks for them. Though I did leave patrickgillespie.net and patrickgillespie.org available for other Patrick Gillespies to pick up.

My main concern now is, what do I do with patrickgillespie.com? I could have it point here, but I kind of want to do something a little more creative, I’m just not sure what. Here are some ideas I was tossing around in my head:

• Personal Blog: This would be the easiest thing to do. However, I already have a livejournal I don’t update much, and I can’t say much about the work I do at work, so I’d feel like this angle might not be very fruitful.
• Topical Video Blog: Something where I could post videos to get across certain topics. I do a lot of online research, and sometimes I find some interesting videos on sites like youtube. A blog that assembled video information on various topics could be interesting.
• Resume Site: A boring option, and probably something that wouldn’t rank well, but a decent filler idea if I can’t decide on anything.
• A Weird Art Project: Something like this, something that just makes people scratch their heads, however, they explore it further because it’s intriguing.
• Patrick Gillespie Information Center: Some kind of web app that aggregates information on people named Patrick Gillespie.
• Puzzle: Maybe have the page just be a puzzle of some sort. Like a riddle that the user has to solve and if they do they can get some kind of reward.

That list basically makes up the ideas I was able to come up with today. Does anything jump out as a good idea? If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

I’m a little prone to conspiousy theories, so I might be jumping the gun here, and I may end up looking totally silly, but I think Yahoo deleted my Color Fader from of their index after I reported some spam in their search results.

A little background: For some reason most of the pages on this site don’t rank well in Yahoo. For the month of May, only 1.87% of my visitors came from Yahoo. That’s compared to 46.37% that came from Google. The Color Fader was the only page that really pulled in visitors from Yahoo. It used to rank #1 for the search phrases “Color Fader” and “Online Color Fader”. Those phrases only brought in around 20 visitors a day, but that’s better than nothing.

Anyway, seeing as these are the only phrases that bring me anything from Yahoo, I check them out every once in a while to see where I am. Around 3 weeks ago I noticed a new site was #1 for them (not unusual - the results tend to get shaken up every so often). However, this new site had the exact same title as my site, so I was a little curious. I opened it up and discovered the page was just auto-generated gibberish with lots of ads.

I was annoyed, but figured I’d just report the site to Yahoo’s Customer Care. In my note I said something like “I was searching for my site when I discovered one that had the exact same title. This site turned out to be auto-generated spam with lots of ads.” I’m not sure why I mentioned I was searching for my own site, I guess I was just typing off the top of my head.

After I submitted my report, I got an email confirmation saying it’d be processed within 48 hours. I checked back twice within that time period. The first time both sites were there, although mine had recaptured the #1 spot. The second time I checked back, both sites were gone.

At first I thought they’d just done some reindexing and I’d fallen a bit. However, after some pretty thorough searching, I found that my app, along with that spam page, was gone from their index. I quickly filled out a resubmit form explaining what I thought had happened - that the reviewer had accidentally deleted my site. I read my message over a couple of times to make sure it was short and polite and then sent it off. A day or so later I got back this reply:

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

If you are not seeing your pages in the Yahoo! Search results, they may
not have been indexed or they may not be in the top results for the
searches that you are conducting. Here are some Yahoo! Help resources
for submitting your page to Yahoo! Search:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/indexing-06.html

and for improving your site’s ranking:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html

in the Yahoo! Search results. There are no current indications that your
pages have been blocked from the Yahoo! index. Please note that all
pages are at all times subject to Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines
located at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Search.

Regards,

Carmen

So according to that email I wasn’t blocked, which was good. However, something still didn’t seem right to me. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that my app and the spam page would disappear from the index at the same time. So I decided to check out Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see what it had on my Color Fader. This is what I found (note: searching with the “www” brings up additional links):

So for some odd reason only the style sheet for the Color Fader is in the index, and not the Color Fader page itself. Even though the links it has recorded for the Color Fader URL point to the app itself and not its style sheet. That seems really bizarre to me. My gut feeling tells me that the page was removed and didn’t drop from the index due to algorithmic reasons. I’m guessing it was either removed by accident, the person processing the spam report just glanced at the URLs and decided to remove them both, or the guy processing the request just didn’t like the fact that I was searching for my own site and decided to knock me off too. The last idea is a little cynical, but my mind tends to wonder all over the place when stuff like this happens. I suppose it could also be a quality issue, but I’d be surprised if that was the case since I don’t think I did anything particularly egregious in my design.

I probably shouldn’t care too much, the Color Fader is kind of girly app, but it annoys me when I try to do something good and then ended up getting punished. As thing are right now, I wouldn’t recommend reporting spam pages to Yahoo, since they might remove your content along with the spam.

It’s been over two weeks since I sent them my last email. I may try to resubmit the site again later today, however, if I say blocked, I stay blocked. It’s annoying, especially since I was beginning to like Yahoo, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

For some reason I couldn’t resist tinkering with the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG) app again. Last Wednesday I updated it so that its generated output would be displayed in Firefox without flickering. I used to do all my web development in IE since it was the most popular, but I switched to working in Firefox and Opera late last year since they have Error Console windows and don’t crash as much (if I have too many IE windows open, my computer slows down and I have to restart it). Though I still double check to make sure things work in IE.

Anyway, for this new update, I decided to get a little flashy and add in a footer that would fade-in when the user typed in a message. I’ve heard that presentation is an important part of the user experience and can be the difference between someone passing a site by and taking a closer look. Plus, after a rapid prototype, I thought the footer looked really cool.

Right now it currently holds the links for opening the message in a new window and generating an image from the text. They’re identified by these icons:

- - - - -

Which I found here. Luckily they’re licensed under the LGPL, which from what I gather from wikipedia, means they’re free for anyone to use as long as they don’t extend them (in which case they have to freely provide the extensions).

I think the new footer came out pretty well. TAAG now feels complete to me, though I’m not going to rule out any future updates. Later this week I’m going to try to get to work on some new stuff, but I don’t want to promise anything since lately I’ve been jumping around in what I work on.

$103

In completely unrelated news, if you’re bored, I found this website to be mildly amusing:

websitevaluecalculator.com

You give it a web address and it’ll tell you how much that site is worth. patorjk.com is apparently worth $103, though a couple of days ago it said 6k, so they must still be modifying their algorithm. I wouldn’t take an analysis from a site like this seriously, but it is kind of fun to see what it says different sites.

I can’t believe it’s been almost 2 weeks since I last updated. It seems like every day I think about something new I could do for this site, yet I only get to do a small portion of what I think about. I have more stuff coming down the tube, though I’m not sure when I’ll have it out. Sometimes I think I’ve got programmer ADD. Anyways…

New TAAG Feature

I added a new feature to the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG) program that allows you to easily generate an image of your ascii art output. In the outputted text, you’ll now see a new link, next to the “Open In A New Window” link, that says “Generate Image”. When you click it, it’ll generate a PNG file of your output.

Currently this feature is only available for FIGlet fonts. I had some issues with getting some of the more eclectic Arial font characters to print. I’ve even noticed that the AOL fonts (which are done in Arial) don’t show up correctly unless I’m using IE, which I find a bit annoying. Anyway, let me know if you have any problems with this feature or if you see any obvious flaws.

WordPress

After reading up a little bit on WordPress optimization tips, I decided to re-do this site’s sidebar. Mostly because I felt like the site related content should come before the outgoing links (sorry guys). I’ve also read that it’s good to have a large feed icon so I made one that blended in with this site’s color scheme. I almost went with this icon:

Which was generated using this nifty little program. However, I wasn’t sure how many people would actually understand what that thing was for, and it is kind of ridiculously big, so I went with something more traditional that had some explanation text (”Get Updates in a Reader”). I read somewhere about an experiment someone did that showed that people were more likely to click a link that said “get updates” than they were to click one that said “subscribe”. I think that makes a lot of sense too, since subscriptions usually cost money and involve you giving out some kind of personal information, which most people don’t want to do.

The other feed icons, the brand-name ones, I got here. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep them. They’re not ads, they’re just links to online feed readers. However, the big Google Ad below them is an ad.

Right now I’m not really sure if this is the layout I want for the sidebar. I may try some different configurations in the coming days, but I haven’t made up my mind. I want something that flows and looks nice and I think I’ve sort of got it, but not really. So you may see things change around a bit. If you have any suggestions/complaints/ideas, let know know.

I also added a feedburner counter. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or a bad idea. However, I do appreciate the adds from those of you who have for some reason or another decided to subscribe to this site.

Subscribe to Comments

Lastly, I also added a new WordPress plugin that allows you to subscribe to certain comment threads on this blog. When you subscribe, you’ll get an email notification each time someone posts a new comment to that thread. I figured this would be pretty useful. At least I know it would have been if I’d had it when everyone was giving their updates in the Three Things to Say entry.

I received 10,765 visitors yesterday, which is pretty good for a small site like this one. Late in the day yesterday I checked my stats and kind of had to do a double take. As soon as I saw the number I knew something had to be up. I checked my referrers and noticed StumbleUpon had sent me a boat load of people.

After a little investigation I found the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG) app had for some reason obtained a lot of “thumbs up”’s from the StumbleUpon community. Someone added TAAG to StumbleUpon months ago, and I received a flurry of visits for a few days after that, but it topped off at around 600, nothing close to the traffic I got yesterday. I’m not sure what caused this avalanche of attention (it seems to have started in the mid afternoon), but it was pretty cool. I haven’t had that many visitors in a single day since I was mentioned in the Lockergnome News Letter back in 2000 (which at the time was a very popular online news letter - now it appears to be some kind of blogging community).

Right now it’s almost 1:30AM and as I write this, and I currently have 1.5k visitors for today already. It’ll be neat to see how long this StumbleUpon bubble lasts. So far my site appears to have held up without any problems too, so site5 earns itself a plus mark in my eyes. 10k isn’t a whole lot, but it’s good to see that sudden bursts of traffic are handled without a problem.

What I’ve Been Doing

It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve been jumping between projects, probably a little too much. Last weekend I was doing some C# stuff, and this past weekend I did a little Javascript (which I’ll talk about below). After reading all the hype on Python, part of me contemplated rewriting the Image Color Palette Generator (ICPG) in Python just as a learning exercise, but I decided to drop the idea after a little more thought. I’ve got too much going on already, and it’s probably better for me to focus on a hand full of projects than it is to try and get a taste of everything.

Ajax Image Uploading

I got image uploading to work separately from the image processing in the ICPG program. Using this nifty jQuery plug-in I was able to set the program up so the user could upload an image and then hit the processing button. It actually worked right out of the box, which is something of a rare occurrence.

ICPG used to handle image uploads, but I kept getting time out errors because my host only allows 15 seconds of processing time for each php file before it kills it. By having image uploading occur separately, I think I can get around this.

However, even though I have something that works now, I’ve decided to wait on uploading it (sorry for being a tease). The new version seems kind of hacked together and since uploads have security issues, I figured I’d take some time to double check everything and try to speed things up as much as possible. I also want to tidy up the interface and get rid of the page reloading.

Well, that’s all for today, I should probably be getting to sleep now since I have to get up for work tomorrow.

I’ve spent the past couple of hours researching VPS (virtual private server) hosting. It’s apparently the next step up after shared hosting. This site isn’t at that level yet, however, I suspect I’ll probably need to upgrade if I keep creating web apps. Anyway, I’m not sure I really made any progress. There are a lot of VPS hosts that look nice, but they’re either too pricey ($100+ a month) or I get horror stories when I Google things like “[hosting company] sucks”. It’d be nice if my current host offered VPS hosting, though according to their forums, they don’t plan to do that anytime soon.

Anyway, over the past week I’ve made a couple of minor updates. I’ll enumerate them below.

• The Snake game was updated to use a snazzy YUI loading dialog (see image below). The loading time is strictly taken up by div creation. I create 2000 divs so the snake can grow without any pauses when you “eat” the red dots. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I haven’t thought of it. Also, a lot of little updates were made to the Snake game, however, you probably wont notice the difference since it’s little stuff that only I’d care about. I know I said this before, but I’m now officially leaving this game alone (with the exception of bug fixes and possible significant performance improvements).
• The dual-thumbed slider bars on the Text Color Fader and Gradient Image Generator were updated so that the thumbs will move when you click on a color.

What’s Next?

I’m thining of making a couple more simple web apps for the site. Right now that’s just what I’m into. I spent a few hours this past week reading some tutorials on jQuery, and it looks really cool. After that I may do some C# or VB stuff. The programming section of this site recently became more popular than the software section, so I’m thinking I should probably try to expand that more - though I’m not sure what angle to take (the old VB stuff is what’s pulling in the visitors). I may make some quizzes, those were fun back in the day and they’re easy to whip up, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I think the forums are officially dead. They had some good exposure. I just don’t think they were targeted right for this site’s audience. Plus there seems to be database issues. Oh well though, there were a couple of interesting topics. I’ll leave them up for the next week or two, but after that I’ll probably take them down.

I’ve split my color fading app into two new online apps with interfaces that utilize Yahoo’s YUI. You can see them here:

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

The new designs are meant to be more concise, cleaner, and easier to use. I tried to think up a nice way to let the user manipulate lots of colors without it looking cluttered. The old design had the problem where the input colors were stacked vertically. The more colors one decided to use, the longer the page got. To fix this, I decided upon using a two thumbed slider bar and a horizontal row of colors that would shift depending on what your selection was (see image below). One thumb indicated the number of colors the user wanted to use and the other one indicated which color the user was currently editing.

I thought it was a really clever way of handling the problem, however, after watching a couple of people try to use the app, I realized it wasn’t that intuitive. People kept clicking on the colors they wanted to edit. And when that wouldn’t work, they assumed there was something wrong with the thing (no one bothered to read the instructions). Oh well. I made a modification to it to allow “color clicking” selection to work.

Hopefully this is the last time I do a complete redesign this program(s). I’ve been perpetually annoyed with myself over the past 3 design jobs I’ve done with it. I was actually working on something else for a while, but for some reason I got side tracked, oh well. I think I have programmer ADD sometimes.

Anyway, both redesigns were finished tonight, so there may be a few bugs. Let me know if you have any problems (or suggestions). The widgets I used from the YUI were the two slider bars and the color picker dialog.

Does archive.org ever delete files that its archived? I’ve noticed that some of the archived files from the older versions of patorjk.com have started disappearing. I went there the other day to grab up my old Snake game and I was unable to retrieve it. My other Flash games were also gone too. This is no big loss, but it’d suck if they actually routinely cleaned house on files that weren’t accessed much. It’d sort of defeat the purpose of archiving.

However, with some Googling I was able to find another one of my old Flash games. The port I did of Sloat’s Drop Graveyard:

Drop Graveyard

I have no idea what it’s doing there. I never uploaded the swf file to any site other than this one. However, I do find it pretty cool that it made its way around the internet and found a new home, even if it is one with tons of ads.

The game seemed to work pretty well for the most part, however it does have a two annoying problems: First off, the high score table doesn’t work since the php file that handled that was on my server. Second off, once you finish a game you’re redirected to their sign up page, which in my opinion is kind of shady. It looks like they modified the game so it’d do that. Though since I’m kind of amused just to see the game again I don’t really care that much.

With my googling I also found the old Drop Graveyard arcadepod page. If you read the reviews on that link you’ll see I got ripped a new one. I honestly thought the game was kind of fun. Not terribly challenging, but its a fun way to spend a few minutes. When I played Sloat’s original game I liked it, but it was the premise and story that really shaped it for me. If you don’t read the story before playing, you wont really know what’s going on.

patorjk.com Banners

While at archive.org, I also noticed that some of the old patorjk.com banners were gone. Some were missing before, but more are missing now. Luckily I grabbed up the ones I saw last time, since the image I based the old patorjk.com logo on is now gone. You can see it here:

That was probably made mostly with filters, but at the time it really blew me away. Ping was actually a really cool guy, I’m not sure what happened to him.

Snake

I’ve made some improvements to the Snake game that I posted up last week. Though I have a couple more ideas for it, I think I’m going to cool it on this project for a while (with the exception of bug fixes). This is mostly because I want to focus more on tool creation rather than on game creation. Anyway, the updates are enumerated below.

• A control panel was added to the bottom of the screen that gives some useful links and tells you the current length of the snake.
• When the snake dies, the part that made a collision turns grey.
• Various bug/anomalies fixed.
• The game was altered so that it could handle faster key presses. Basically I created a direction queue. This helps when you press a couple of arrow keys really quickly. Instead of using the last pressed arrow key as the direction to move in when you arrive in a new square, the game queues up all of the arrow keys you press and executes each movement as you go along. I noticed that this helped out in those really tense situations where you have to make a lot of careful turns.

During my senior year of high school I took an independent study course in C++. Originally it had been a full fledged C++ course with a teacher and everything, but since only 4 students signed up, they had us all do independent study projects instead. Independent study courses at my school worked by allowing you to work by yourself to create some project that you would then present to some committee to show that you had learned some stuff.

The only problem with this was that we had no text books, no access to any compilers of any kind, and no authority figure who really knew anything about computers. The lady who was in charge of the school’s computer labs (referred to behind her back as “The Troll Lady”) was mean and irrational.

She forbid us to use the c++ compilers that were available in the upstairs computer lab because they were “too old” (we weren’t even allowed access to that lab). We also weren’t allowed to install stuff on the computers in the downstairs lab. So we were basically left with no way to do anything c++ related at school, unless we wanted to sit and read the books we had purchased ourselves. To make things worse, we didn’t really get along. Since our school was more arts/drama oriented, the kids who were good at computers tended to be kind of snobby. The kind that would call you an idiot for not knowing some obscure unix fact.

I digress though. The only reason I mention all of this is because this is when I discovered the game of Snake. Since I couldn’t do anything programming-related, I’d just sit and play Flash or Java games for the first hour and a half of the school day (we had block scheduling).

Basically I’d come in, watch Flash videos from NewGrounds, and then horse around on the different internet games I was able to find. Snake ended up being my favorite. I honestly sucked at it then and still suck at it now, but it was pretty mindless and actually pretty fun. Years later I’d implement my own version in Flash (which used to be featured at this site).

Anyway, a couple of days ago I was working on some other Javascript project for this site when I randomly started thinking about the olden days. After remembering how much I loved Snake I thought to myself “Hrm, I bet I could write a version of Snake entirely in Javascript”. Since Snake is such a simple game, I decided to run with the idea and try and crank out a Javascript version as quick as possible. You can see what I’ve got so far by following the below link:

http://patorjk.com/games/snake

That is fresh from my hard drive, and it’s a really bare bones version. I hope to add a couple more features and to optimize it some over the next week. Since Javascript is interpreted, the game may be a little jumpy on some of your computers (let me know if you have any major problems). When it’s totally done I’ll probably also post the source as a Javascript example. You could peak at it right now if you wanted, but it’s in a not-ready-for-prime-time state right now.

As an aside, under the hood the snake is a linked list. I googled “Javascript linked list” for some quick linked list code and came across this link, which is actually pretty nifty. It’s worth a look if it’s been a while since you’ve done anything with linked lists.

TAAG

TAAG was updated with a couple of fonts (they all start with “JS”) and I fixed up the feature that allows you to share messages you create with others.

Knowing that I’m 26 makes me feel old. When I don’t think about the number, I feel like a young guy. At work, I’m the only person on my team who’s in their 20’s. Less than 2 years ago I was in college working on my masters. So on one hand, I am sort of still young, but knowing that college is completely behind me and that I’m more than a quarter century old makes me feel like I’m beginning to exit the “young” era.

Time seems to just fly by, doesn’t it? It was actually almost 10 years ago that I started this site up. I don’t remember the exact date the site went online, but I believe it was sometime during the Spring of 1998. Here’s an early screen shot from its first incarnation (the very first version of the site was just the main frame without the left hand navigation panel):

I still remember getting email from people who said they loved the content of my site, but hated the design. Each page had its own crazy background image and moving gifs. I had no clue what I was doing though, it was just a fun project. It’s cool to think that its survived so long.

As an interesting side note, I was originally inspired to start this site after getting an email that said “Your site sucks”. See, back in ~1996 I found a free personal webpage service called Geocities. Since no one had their own web page back then, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So I created a Geocities webpage. However, since I wasn’t very computer literate, I fumbled around with their online editor, got frustrated, and then left. The site ended up being a black background with black text, the text being a list of jokes I had swiped from some other site. And for no apparent reason, the page had a picture of Spock in the upper left hand corner (they only had like 5 sample images that their editor would let you use). This guy must have found my forgotten creation while browsing the Geocities’ website directory. Apparently it upset him so much that he felt like he needed to send me an email. I was so annoyed with the message that I decided to go fix the page up, and while doing that I decided to make it about my current interest - which at the time was programming.

Had I not gotten that email I probably would have still eventually started this web site, however, it would have had a different history and it might have even gone in a different direction. It’s odd that a piece of hate mail motivated me to create something that evolved into what you now see before you. The butterfly effect at work.

Anyway, going back to age, I suppose you’re only as old as you feel, and at the moment, I feel pretty young.

TAAG

I’ve been trying out some new Javascript tools for possible inclusions in upcoming apps, but nothing I really want to get too much into now. TAAG has seen some significant updates in the past few days though. I completely changed the interface in the control panel and added two new features:

• A feature that lets you open your text up in a new window. So you can more easily share what you type with your friends. Check it out. Right now the feature is still in beta and doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the normal text that’s generated (colors, alignment, etc). I hope to add that by the end of the week (it’s a quick addition, I’ve just been really really short on time).
• This one was a request, it’s a feature that allows you to replace the white spaces with whatever character you want. This feature can be found in the “More Options” section.

Originally I had been aiming to update the “Image Color Palette Generator”, but I ended up getting stuck on something so I decided to take a break and work on some TAAG updates. Hopefully there will be a new version of ICPG out sometime this month.

Forums

Despite not catching immediate fire, I’m keeping the patorjk.com forums alive and active. I plan to check them out at least 3 times a day. So feel free to look around or make a post or two. I’ve recently changed the “SEO” forum into a “Web Related” forum. It’s sort of a catch all forum for anything interesting that’s web related.

It’s late and if I don’t get to bed soon I’m going to be sincerely sorry in the morning (I’ve got a 9:30 meeting - only early if you consider the fact I’ll be going to bed at 2). So it’s finally here. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell anyone who will listen, patorjk.com has forums again:

http://patorjk.com/forums/

Please sign up and make a post - feel free to write about anything as long as it makes sense for the category in which its posted. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

Some side notes: I deleted my old forum installation and reinstalled a new one. I saw that two of you had created user names. I didn’t purposely delete your user names. I’m assuming those of you who signed up for the forum found it via Google. For some reason it showed up as the 4th link for when you do a search for “patorjk” (it’s moved down a little now). At the time I figured I’d let it be since it’d probably make for an interesting find for anyone who was randomly searching for stuff.

A discussion within the comments of one of my previous posts got me thinking about the past and how this site used to host a lot of neat programming examples. When I restarted the site last year one of my aims was to reinvent the site and to stay away from being an example depot. However, some of the examples I used to host weren’t available elsewhere and people did put a lot of effort into what they sent me. Not only that, the examples did seem to help people out.

When I made a post complaining about how all of my files were deleted, someone sent me a zip of all the programming examples they had downloaded from my site. The person had apparently made the zip one summer when they had decided to teach themselves how to program. The person told me they weren’t going to have net access during that summer so they had gone through my site and grabbed up all of the examples they thought would be useful.

Apparently they learned a decent amount and had archived some of them on their computer for future reference. I thought this was a pretty cool story, though since I was still in my “no old stuff” mind set, I didn’t post up the examples. However, thinking back about the VB Contest and Craig Jr, I decided it was worth putting up an archive of the old examples. I’ve re-created the old example page with everything listed, though some of the files are still missing. What’s available for download either comes from the zip I was sent or from archive.org. You can view the new example archive here:

Visual Basic 6.0 Example Archive

If anyone has any of the examples that are currently labeled “Missing” please let me know.

Forums

I’ve made my decision. There will be forums on this site, and soon. For now, give me around a week or two to get things set up - I want to iron out the details and play around with the forum software I have.

I know only a hand full of you said you’d be up for it, but there’s definitely a decent amount of passer byers / lurkers coming to this site, if interesting discussion cropped up I’m sure people would join in.

Also, thanks to everyone who replied in that thread.

Small Updates

• The About page was updated.
• The Ad format was changed for the blog. I figured the footer of each blog post would be a good place to stick them. I read up a little on inserting them inside of the actual blog post content, but that almost always annoys me when I see it so I went with the footer option.

Things Coming Soon

I’m working on a number of things but due to time issues everything seems to be taking forever. However, I hope to have TAAG and Image Color Palette Generator updates out soon.