All posts by patorjk

General News

patrickgillespie.com – What Should I Do With It?

12 Comments

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, it kind of sucks to know that that’s what people see when they Google my name. 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 things took an interesting turn and I might be able to unseat that crappy website. 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.

Uncategorized

Did Yahoo Punish Me For Reporting Spam?

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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.

Interesting News Articles, Software

Getting A Little Flashy And Free Icons

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.

General News, Software

Souping Up WordPress and TAAG Updates

10 Comments

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.

General News, Programming Examples

StumbleUpon-ed

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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.

Uncategorized

Minor Updates and Future Plans

10 Comments

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.

Uncategorized

Rethinking The Color Fader User Interface(s)

11 Comments

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.

Software

Drop Graveyard and Snake Updates

4 Comments

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.
General News, Software

JavaScript Snake

16 Comments

During my senior year of high school, I took an independent study course in C++. Originally it had been a full fledged C++ course, but since only 4 students signed up, the school put us all in its independent study program instead. The program worked by allowing students to work by themselves to create a project, and at the end of the semester each student would present their project to a committee to show that they had actually learned something.

On the surface it seemed like a great program, but the school did its hardest to keep us from learning anything. The lady in charge of the program forbid us from using the computers that had C++ compilers, claiming they were “too old”, and we weren’t allowed to install anything on the computers we did have access to.

At first we were resilient and installed compilers we found online anyway. But getting caught got us in a lot of trouble, and this lady was mean – at one point yelling at me for a solid 20 minutes for breaking one of her rules. This environment wore us down, and eventually we resided ourselves to knowing that we weren’t going to efficiently learn anything about C++ while we were at school, so we used a lot of our time to goof off.

It was during this time that I discovered the game of Snake. When I was tired of reading up on programming or dealing with crap from the lady in charge of the computer lab, I’d blow off steam by playing online games. Sometimes I’d spend the whole hour and a half period playing games. Of these games, 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.

A few days ago, while working on some other JavaScript project for this site, I randomly started thinking about these 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.

General News, Software

Today I am 26

6 Comments

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.