{"id":3742,"date":"2025-09-30T13:57:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T17:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2025-09-30T13:58:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T17:58:12","slug":"patorjk-com-overhaul-phase-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/30\/patorjk-com-overhaul-phase-1\/","title":{"rendered":"patorjk.com Overhaul: Phase 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After recently redoing my Arial ASCII Art Gallery<\/a> and TAAG app<\/a>, I’ve decided to keep the momentum going and refurbish other areas of this site. For various reasons (young kids, work, photography, other commitments), I’ve let this site languish over the last several years. While it’s interesting as a time capsule, I’d prefer to have something up that people actually find useful. Here’s what I’ve been working on:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Main Page<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’ve created a new main page<\/a>. If you’re on desktop you’ll see the spotlight effect from my react-halloween library<\/a>, but otherwise it’s just a simple directory listing of the main content on this site. The previous main page wasn’t bad, but I wanted something cleaner looking that I could expand upon later with fun ideas (like the spotlight effect).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Color Palette Generator<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Color Palette Generator<\/a> has undergone a makeover. This was one of the oldest apps on the site. It allows you to generate a color palette from an image, which can be useful when designing a website or creating artwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote the app in 2008, then updated it in 2010 to add the “Muller Colors<\/a>” palette option. There are now countless apps on the internet like this, but I was partial towards mine ever since a rug website reached out years ago to get access to the underlying algorithm. Apparently they had tested many palette generators, and my algorithm worked best for their rugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The app was in desperate need of a makeover, so I’ve modernized its design. I’m unsure how much more work to put into this since there are now so many similar apps, but I may add some additional palette generation algorithms in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chain Letter Archive<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’m a collector of things, and in the 90’s I started a chain letter collection. A handful of the funny ones made their way to this website, but their organization was never very clear and their format was unsuitable for mobile devices. So I made a dedicated page<\/a> that explains what they are and why they’re here. I also reformatted them so they can easily be read on small screens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The HTML of some of these letters was copied directly from AOL emails, so it was full of mismatched and deprecated tags (like FONT). Clean-up was a daunting task, so for three of the letters I decided to use AI to clean up the HTML and put them in a more responsive format. Surprisingly, the AI didn’t like the content of these emails. In some cases it even refused to translate them, and in others it censored or rewrote the jokes. It was kind of fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an aside, I’ve debated removing these letters from the site since they’re a little embarrassing. I was a teen when I collected them, and the humor is pretty juvenile. But chain letters were a part of the early internet\u2014I think they were the first kind of content to go viral\u2014and they’ve basically disappeared from the web. I don’t think the ones I have collected here are available anywhere else. At the very least, they’re an interesting time capsule showing what viral content looked like 30 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facebook Like Buttons<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I went through a phase 10-15 years ago where I was putting “like” and “share” buttons from third-party sites like Facebook on pieces of content. Kind of hilariously, I discovered that the Facebook Like buttons on this site displayed a like count but no longer worked. Somewhere along the line they became frozen in time, I’m guessing they required a code update or something. Whatever the case, I removed them. I did leave the X\/Twitter buttons since they still work and appear to be occasionally used. I may eventually remove those too though, as third-party APIs inevitably break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s Next?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I plan to update some of the older and lesser-viewed sections on this site. There’s definitely content that needs a facelift. I’ll probably avoid updating stuff that gets decent traffic though, since I don’t want to mess with something people are actively using and create unnecessary angst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’ve got suggestions for improvements or notice anything broken, feel free to reach out. In the meantime, check out the updates and let me know what you think!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After recently redoing my Arial ASCII Art Gallery and TAAG app, I’ve decided to keep the momentum going and refurbish other areas of this site. For various reasons (young kids, work, photography, other commitments), I’ve let this site languish over the last several years. While it’s interesting as a time capsule, I’d prefer to have … Continue reading patorjk.com Overhaul: Phase 1<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3742"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3747,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3742\/revisions\/3747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}