{"id":86,"date":"2008-01-28T02:53:39","date_gmt":"2008-01-28T06:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/28\/slider-puzzle-source-code-and-other-nonsense\/"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:03:44","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T22:03:44","slug":"slider-puzzle-source-code-and-other-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/28\/slider-puzzle-source-code-and-other-nonsense\/","title":{"rendered":"Slider Puzzle Source Code and Other Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve finally gotten around to releasing my Slider Puzzle source code<\/a>. Hopefully someone out there can find a good use for it. I was tempted to set up a Jessica Alba puzzle on some free web hosting site and then link to it from here (as an example of how this code could be used), but I thought better of it.<\/p>\n

At work, we do these things called “code reviews”, where everyone on the team reads over your code and gives you comments. It’s actually more helpful than one would think. Sometimes you don’t see small mistakes, like forgetting to update a comment, and sometimes people have suggestions on how to more gracefully do something. You actually learn a decent amount after attending a few of them. Occasionally someone will get ripped a new one, but that doesn’t happen too often.<\/p>\n

I tried to give myself a code review before I released this code, but undoubtedly there will still be some imperfections somewhere. Hopefully the code is understandable though. If you decide to use it, let me know and I’ll give you a shout out on this blog.<\/p>\n

Google Reader \/ Welcome to 2005<\/p>\n

Despite all the press they’ve recieved, I’ve never used a feed reader. I knew what they were for, but for some reason I didn’t think I really needed one. When I re-started this site last year, someone emailed me asking me to put a link to the RSS feed, so I did, but I didn’t really bother trying out a feed reader myself. I finally got around to checking out Google Reader today, and honestly, I can’t believe I waited so long! This thing is great! You wouldn’t think they it would be that handy, but after setting things up, it’s actually a really nice tool.<\/p>\n

Feed readers basically keep track of various sites you’re interested in and alert you when a new blog post \/ update occurs. In Google Reader, if you think a particular blog post \/ news story \/ whatever is interesting, you can share it with your “friends” (this is really your Gmail contacts, so you have to be careful – Google got some flap over this recently).<\/p>\n

After playing around with it some, I went around to all the places I normally visit to see if they had links for feeds. Most didn’t, which was slightly annoying, but since I didn’t really bother paying attention to feed readers until recently, I can’t really blame other site owners. Anyway, if you’ve never bothered to check out a feed reader, I highly recommend taking a look at Google Reader<\/a> (side notes: it’s free and I’m not being paid anything to talk about it or link it here).<\/p>\n

Ads<\/p>\n

After doing some experimentation, I’ve decided to keep the Google Ads strictly to the blog. They’re not generating a whole lot of clicks, but they’ve gotten a few. I placed them on a few choice pages for a while, but I decided to take them down because I think ads can cheapen the look certain pages (plus I felt kind of dirty having them on things like the VB Array tutorial). I think my rule of thumb will be to keep this site ad free unless I’m dealing with a) the blog or b) a page that’s getting 10,000+ views a day. A friend of mine gave me the second option as a rule of thumb for when to use ads and it seems to make sense (the ads can help deal with the bandwidth plus make you a couple of extra bucks). I don’t mind having them on the blog since I don’t think they come off as annoying, they can be blocked without the page looking strange, and since I don’t update every day, they can serve as somewhere to go if you’re truly bored (for those of you who click ads, whoever you are).<\/p>\n

Ambitions \/ New Company<\/p>\n

So yeah, I haven’t been doing all this ad experimentation simply for just this site. For about a year now I’ve been talking to some of my old grad school buddies about possibly starting a web 2.0 style site that could generate revenue. Nothing really came out of it at first since they were still finishing their thesis projects, however, now that one is done and the other is almost done, we’re actually making some progress. We haven’t coded anything yet, but we’ve spent the past month brainstorming ideas and narrowing things down. It actually looks like we’re going to make a run at this, which I think would be pretty cool. If you never hear me mention this again, you’ll know things fell through, but if the wheels keep turning I’ll make sure and keep you all posted on this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve finally gotten around to releasing my Slider Puzzle source code. Hopefully someone out there can find a good use for it. I was tempted to set up a Jessica Alba puzzle on some free web hosting site and then link to it from here (as an example of how this code could be used), … Continue reading Slider Puzzle Source Code and Other Nonsense<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-news","category-programming-examples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","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=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2763,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/2763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}