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!

Things have been going well, though I haven’t gotten any website-related work done in the last week and I’ve been really tired. This past weekend my roommate, his brother, and myself moved most of the essentials into the new appartment, and later today (Wednesday) I get my bed. So I’ll offically be moving in today. We’ve been rather slow about the whole process, but I think it’s mostly because he had to finish his thesis (he defended on the 5th) and I had a bunch of little things I had to take care of.

I hope to have some new stuff up soon, but I don’t want to set any dates since I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to work on things. I still have a lot of new apartment things I need to do.

MySpace.com Search

For a couple of years now I’ve noticed that Google is better at finding myspace profiles than MySpace is. MySpace’s search feature just sucks. I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a MySpace profile search app that uses Google. Something in the same vein as g2p.org. I’m not sure I’ll do it, since it’s not something I do often, but I figured I’d float the idea out here to see if anyone was interested. Facebook has apparently allowed the profiles it stores to be indexed too, however, the search feature on that site is excellent and can’t really be improved on by using Google.

Spammed

This made me smile, well, the post near the bottom by milorad did. A couple of months back I asked the WordPress.com community about a weird Trackback issue I had been having and I ended up with some rather icy responses. I’m glad someone was nice enough to take the time and answer my question. It sucks to think that a certain percentage of my visitors are spam robots, but I guess that happens to every site with a blog and there really isn’t much one can do. Also, I ask you all to please not post in that thread. I don’t want to cause a disturbance or seem like I’m trying to start something. I just wanted to share it here since finding it made my day :).

Over the Thanksgiving break I started on a new web app and a tutorial. Not sure when either will be out though. I’ve been tired all week so I don’t expect to get too much work done on them until maybe Thursday or Friday (I’d put both at 50% right now).

As a distraction, I found myself re-discovering Half Life 2, the first person shooter game that won all those awards back in 2004. If you’ve never played HL2, let me just echo what everyone else in the world has been saying: It’s an AMAZING game. Possibly the best game I’ve ever played (next to maybe American McGee’s Alice). I don’t really consider myself a gamer either. The last game I was really into was Doom 3, and that was back in 2005. When I fall for a game though, I fall hard.

I spent my whole winter break playing Doom 3 all night. It was funny because I’d wake up around 4-5 in the afternoon, right as my roommate was coming home from work, and then I’d go to bed around 6-7 in the morning, right as my roommate was leaving for work. Well, I should get to bed, waiting until the last minute to write these things is always a bad idea.

I’m taking off work this week, and my plan is to make something of it, so hopefully I’ll have some fresh new content to post up. Ideas I’m currently juggling around are: writing a tutorial, writing a facebook game (I bash facebook sometimes, but it is something almost everyone uses), or making a new online app. Or possibly re-doing my color fader. I really don’t like its interface. But I’ll figure all this out later. In the mean time, here are some random bits of news…

Popular with the Ladies

I stumbled upon an interesting internet tracking site called QuantCast. According to its website its “the only open internet ratings service. We provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services.” I’m not sure how it tracks websites, and I have never seen this site before today, but I discovered that it had data for my website, you can see it here:

http://www.quantcast.com/patorjk.com

According to the data they provide, this site gets more female visitors than male visitors. Interesting, interesting… hey ladies… j/k, actually, this is all kind of funny because I really doubt that, unless the majority of people who view TAAG are female. Though then again, maybe I just don’t know my audience very well.

The website also says “The site is popular among a 60-100k HH income bracket, more educated audience.” Which I thought was interesting.

As a side note to all of this, way back in the day I had a poll up on my main page that asked the viewer if they were male or female. The results came back 90% male, 10% female (I forget how many votes were cast, but it was a decent amount). So it’d be really interesting if the scales had tipped as much as that site says they have.

Google Trends

If you don’t know about Google Trends, you need to visit this site now:

http://www.google.com/trends

It’s amazing how much fun that tool is. I can’t believe digg is more popular than reddit, fark and slashdot put together. I was also shocked to learn that Pepsi was more popular than Coke (in terms of google searches). This site [NSFW!] has some more risque suggestions. But anyway, if you’re bored, it’s a fun tool to play around with.

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).

I’ve been feeling somewhat drained the past week. I’m not sure why. This past weekend I went to my cousin’s wedding down in North Carolina. I was looking forward to it because I wanted to get my wedding count up. I think I’m one of the few young people who’ve been to more funerals than weddings. It was a Jewish wedding too, so I figured it’d be interesting. In the end it was ok, I’m not much of a social butterfly so it was weird not knowing anyone except my cousin, his mom, and my mom. And though I think my cousin is making a good choice, I think a lot of people rush into marriage. I still remember a friend of mine lecturing me about how “when you know, you know”, and then later in the conversation confessing to me that they weren’t sure if they really loved their fiance. How can you be sure you’ve found the one, but not sure you love them? I think a decent number of people get worried about not finding someone and then end up making a poor choice (Also, Noah, if for some reason you ever happen to read this, no, this story is not about your fiancee). Anyways…

Radiohead – In Rainbows

I don’t normally tout new music releases, but this music is ONLINE and FREE and by my favorite band so I figured it’d make sense to mention it here. Radiohead are trying a new experiment where they’re putting their music online and you can pay whatever you want for it. I recommend downloading it for free to see if you like it, and then if you do, go back and buy it. It’s honestly their best record since OK Computer. The song that sticks out most to me is “Videotape”, it’s by far the most beautiful song I’ve heard this year.

WikiBooks

My thesis: Programming books are becoming obsolete. Nobody seems to learn languages via books anyway. Even the smartest programmers I talk to seem to pick up things from reading various articles or through reading documentation while chugging through a new programming project. I picked up a book on PHP a couple months back, and I found myself wishing I could jump around to different topics. I could easily look up each interesting idea in the book’s index, but that’s kind of a pain in the butt. Plus I’d like to be able to interactively test examples as I come to them. That’s when the idea hit me: Why not make wikibooks? Of course, like any good idea, I figured someone had to have already implemented it, and after some googling, here’s what I found:

Wikibooks: Programming Languages Bookshelf

That’s it?

There was more to “dump”, but it’s late and I need to get to bed.