{"id":93,"date":"2008-04-03T02:07:34","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T06:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/03\/today-i-am-26\/"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:02:04","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T22:02:04","slug":"today-i-am-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/03\/today-i-am-26\/","title":{"rendered":"Today I am 26"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Knowing that I&#8217;m 26 makes me feel old. When I don&#8217;t think about the number, I feel like a young guy. At work, I&#8217;m the only person on my team who&#8217;s in their 20&#8217;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\u2019m more than a quarter century old makes me feel like I&#8217;m beginning to exit the &#8220;young&#8221; era.<\/p>\n<p>Time seems to just fly by, doesn&#8217;t it? It was actually almost 10 years ago that I started this site up. I don&#8217;t remember the exact date the site went online, but I believe it was sometime during the Spring of 1998. Here&#8217;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):<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/images\/patorjkonline10.jpg\" height=\"188\" width=\"250\" \/><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s cool to think that its survived so long.<\/p>\n<p>As an interesting side note, I was originally inspired to start this site after getting an email that said &#8220;Your site sucks&#8221;. 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&#8217;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&#8217; 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 &#8211; which at the time was programming.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, going back to age, I suppose you&#8217;re only as old as you feel, and at the moment, I feel pretty young.<\/p>\n<p>TAAG<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been trying out some new Javascript tools for possible inclusions in upcoming apps, but nothing I really want to get too much into now. <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/software\/taag\/\">TAAG<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.patorjk.com\/software\/taag\/msg1.php?font=Dancing%20Font.flf&amp;hs=true&amp;txt=jvgu%20gur%20yvtugf%20bhg%0D%0Avgf%20yrff%20qnatrebhf%0D%0Aurer%20jr%20ner%20abj%0D%0Aragregnva%20hf\">Check it out<\/a>. Right now the feature is still in beta and doesn&#8217;t have all of the capabilities of the normal text that&#8217;s generated (colors, alignment, etc). I hope to add that by the end of the week (it&#8217;s a quick addition, I&#8217;ve just been really really short on time).<\/li>\n<li>This one was a request, it&#8217;s a feature that allows you to replace the white spaces with whatever character you want. This feature can be found in the &#8220;More Options&#8221; section.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Originally I had been aiming to update the &#8220;Image Color Palette Generator&#8221;, 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.<\/p>\n<p>Forums<\/p>\n<p>Despite not catching immediate fire, I&#8217;m keeping the <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/forums\/\">patorjk.com forums<\/a> 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&#8217;ve recently changed the &#8220;SEO&#8221; forum into a &#8220;Web Related&#8221; forum. It&#8217;s sort of a catch all forum for anything interesting that&#8217;s web related.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Knowing that I&#8217;m 26 makes me feel old. When I don&#8217;t think about the number, I feel like a young guy. At work, I&#8217;m the only person on my team who&#8217;s in their 20&#8217;s. Less than 2 years ago I was in college working on my masters. So on one hand, I am sort of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/03\/today-i-am-26\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Today I am 26<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-news","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","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=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2757,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/2757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}