I’m approaching 10,000 visitors for the month of October, which is pretty cool. Not sure if I’ll get there, but I’m only 300 visits away, so it’ll be close either way.

As I’ve stated in the past, however, a lot of that is traffic to other parts of this site. TAAG is still the reining king when it comes to the most visited page I have, and after that it’s the VB 6.0 Code Bank, and then, after that, it’s this blog.

I was actually thinking of getting TAAG its own domain, but the whole search for one left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth. All the domain names I was interested in were taken – and not by legitimate sites, but ad sites. Basically people who had bought up the domain name and were offering it up for a large sum (in my case, $3,000 – more than I want to spend on something I’m giving away for free). It really pissed me off. The “.us” domain was still available, but “.us” is kind of a crappy extension. So I’ll have to think about it. And there really isn’t a need to move it away from this site so not finding a domain name isn’t that big of a deal.

Slider Puzzles

I’ve taken Sloat’s advice and updated my slider puzzle script so that the images don’t have to be chopped up. I haven’t uploaded the code onto this site yet, but I plan to soon. I’m thinking I’m going to release this script as a download that people can configure for their own sites (hopefully using it will be as simple as uploading the code and along with the selected images). It seems like a waste to have it simply be for old paintings. It could probably do more good elsewhere. I’ve been thinking about emailing some photographers to see if I can get some cool pics, but even if I do, I’ll still release the source.

Patrick Gillespie

Oh, the vanity. This is something I shouldn’t care about, but for some reason it bugs me that the #1 link on google for the term “Patrick Gillespie” is some news story on another Patrick Gillespie who is a huge pervert. I’m slowly climbing in my page rank, so I may displace the article, but it sucks seeing that attached to my name. Plus, the article doesn’t give any other details on the guy other than the fact that he is named “Patrick Gillespie”.

Ghost Stories

When I was little, I wanted to be a writer. I even had a story I wrote in 6th grade get published in some young writers book (it was selected by my 6th grade teacher). It was pretty cool. I even bumped into some random kid at the grocery store who had read it and liked it. It totally made me feel famous (the book was distributed to every school in the county though, so in actuality this wasn’t that big of a deal).

Anyway, somewhere down the line I lost interest and wound up programming stuff instead. I did have a brief relapse into my writing ways back in college though. When I was young, I’d write mostly sci-fi and humor type stories, but in college, I switched to writing horror stories. If you’re in a ghoulish mood this Halloween, you can check out my most popular stories below*…

The Becoming
A Doll’s House
The Doll Collection

*The Becoming was initially the most popular, but I had to re-write it after fanfiction.net deleted their music section (in fact, most of the stories I have up were ones I thought were decent enough to re-write after the music section was removed).