It’s unfinished, it’s unpolished, but at least it’s something new 🙂

http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/

While I was looking through some old AOL stuff I was inspired by the old “Macro Shop” art of the late nineties. I hadn’t seen it in a long time and I remembered an old idea I had back in 2000. So I figured it’d be fun to program up. A lot of those fonts were incredibly hard to find. If you have any, please send them to me (txt files only). I also added in 2 non-AOL prog fonts that I saw while surfing the web.

As you can probably tell, it’s just a for fun program. Though it can have some possible uses if you want some cool looking letters. I’ll be adding onto it throughout the next week or two. There will be a ton of more features (right now the “Advanced Features” are commented out since they don’t all work) and a whole lot more fonts. I’m going to set it up to read Figlet font files, which will allow it to use an incredible number of fonts. I’m also going to make it open source. That way, if an ascii art font writer wanted, they could use the program on their website to show off the fonts they make.

Someone messaged me and told me the downloading of the add-ins wasn’t working. I tried it out myself and found that though the program correctly downloaded the add-in list, for some reason it wasn’t able to download the files. Since I lost the source to my spy and it’s code add-in companions in a hard drive crash two years ago (on man did that suck), there wasn’t really anything I could do – except recode the downloader.

The downloader is a very simple application so I decided to do just that. Below is a link where you can download the Add-In downloader and its source code. I’ve also included these files in the API Spy zip on the Software page.

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/codeaddins_april5_2007.zip – The add-in downloader and its source.

I’ve been playing around a bit with WordPress, which allows you to create blogs like the one you see in front of you. It’s actually a really cool piece of software.

The new site will revolve around this blog. Unlike the past, where things were released in bulk, I’ll probably be updating this incrementally. As can easily be seen, this blog is far from complete. I’ll try and update it more this weekend. Anyway, it’s 3:30am over here and I need to get some sleep.

Someone emailed me about getting a copy of mosaicer. I’ve uploaded a copy here:

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/mosaicer2.zip

Also, a visitor by the name of “Awesome Andrew” recently sent me a zip of many of my old programming examples and tutorials (thanks!). I may post some of these up. However, like I said before, I wont be reverting to the old site, so only some of that stuff will be posted.

Wait, what’s this? New content? Hahaha… patorjk.com is back my friends and it feels good to see it up again.

I’ve finally realized what I want this site to be: Open source software! For the past 4 years I’ve struggled with the direction that I want this site to go in, and all this time in was right in front of me. Screw programming examples!* Screw online games! Screw trying to make money off software! There may be some online game stuff / tools, but the key will be open source stuff. Tools that people can use.

In the past few years I’ve also changed in the way I feel about code I write. When I was younger, it was something special, and I always liked to have some credit. Not anymore. Who cares! If I post something up, I’ll probably say you can incorporate it into your own software without me caring. If you don’t get it here, there’s probably another 100 places on the web you could get it anyway.

On another note, my hard drive has crashed 2 times in the past 2 years, and I didn’t have a back up of the site (though I think I have a back up of my API Spy somewhere, which I’ll try and post up since I’m aware it’s my most popular program). However, other than that, this site will be totally from scratch.

Not sure what direction I’ll take the freeware in, only time will tell. Outside of this site, I’m working with some of my old grad school buddies on some other sites (that will have a goal of making money). If these get off the ground, I may post links to them so you can check them out. However, they might go no where, or end up lame, so I may not post info on them.

If you need to contact me, do it with gmail. You can probably guess my email address from that info :).

UPDATE: Ok, while looking through my backup disks I found a copy of my spy:

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/patorjkapispy51.zip

* Who am I kidding? There will programming examples…