Jasper's Blog

Hey y'all! Name's Jasper. I'm the guy behind Jasper-Search, a small homebrew search engine (of sorts) that's about finding interesting stuff online. On this blog, I'll be showcasing some of the cool stuff I've run across, and occasionally ramble on about different aspects of web design.

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General update

Y'all might have noticed that there haven't been any updates to either the website or this blog in a while, and there's a simple reason for that.

After looking through the logs that I've accumulated over the past several months, it's become obvious that while I had a good idea, the execution wasn't that great. So, I've decided to completely overhaul how things are handled on the site, and to go along with this change, I'm also rebranding the project.

New look, new layout, new name.

Hopefully The Guide Monster will be live by July, and everything will proceed better than ever before.

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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

With millions of devout worshippers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents – mostly fundam

Site Spotlight: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Pastafarian religion is unique, to say the least. The simplest explanation is that this "church" is the result of people becoming fed up with the hateful and sometimes overly entitled behaviors of modern religious people. But it's important to remember that this group isn't "pro atheist" as much as "anti-hate"; seeing absurdity as a way of making a point about how people expect their beliefs to be taken as truth by everyone they meet.

In summary, may you be touched by his noodly appendage!

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SkyMaul 2 will win your laughter with humor that sparkles as it cleans

Site Spotlight: SkyMaul

Want some weird novelty toys and gadgets? The SkyMaul has you covered! This parody website is made up to look like a real online retailer, but it's just a massive joke about our buying habits.

Note that there actually is something to buy here -- it's the site's crazy parody catalogue.

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...so good news, bad news time.

First, a quick explanation. In order to find cool websites, I built myself a program that would search the internet and make reports about the sites it finds. This resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of reports, and so I set up a system to help me sort through them.

This system was entirely on a computer running an old version of XUbuntu . Yesterday, the newest edition of XUbuntu was released, and I decided to upgrade that computer.

The bad news is that I neglected to back up the database that contained the millions of reports the bot collected last year. I'm going to need to start all over.

Worse, I may not have backed up some of the scripts that ran it.

Naturally, I realized this AFTER installing the new system, so it's completely gone by this point.

And just to clarify: none of this affects the site directly. What's up now is safe, as it's not hosted by my computers. This just means that it'll be a while before I can upload new links.

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INCREDIBLY AWESOME NEWS!

I was working on my laptop, preparing to set things up to re-scan the internet all over again, and I discovered a script was missing. Figuring that I might have deleted it, I looked into the Recycle bin and discovered a file that looked like a MySQL database dump.

Turns out, it was an old backup of the database I accidentally erased last week! This backup was from February, so while there was some cleaning up to do, but it's otherwise entirely restored!

I've also managed to repair the scripts that manage it, so we're back in business like nothing happened!

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...so good news, bad news time.

First, a quick explanation. In order to find cool websites, I built myself a program that would search the internet and make reports about the sites it finds. This resulted in literally hundreds of thousands of reports, and so I set up a system to help me sort through them.

This system was entirely on a computer running an old version of XUbuntu . Yesterday, the newest edition of XUbuntu was released, and I decided to upgrade that computer.

The bad news is that I neglected to back up the database that contained the millions of reports the bot collected last year. I'm going to need to start all over.

Worse, I may not have backed up some of the scripts that ran it.

Naturally, I realized this AFTER installing the new system, so it's completely gone by this point.

And just to clarify: none of this affects the site directly. What's up now is safe, as it's not hosted by my computers. This just means that it'll be a while before I can upload new links.

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Site Spotlight: The Museum of Four in the Morning

I love little niche sites like this one! This site plays a randomly selected video clip that references 4:00 AM. It doesn't autoplay the scene, so click on the black rectangle to see it.

That's pretty much all there is to this website, but it's silly enough to warrant some attention!

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The Death Generator

Site Spotlight: The Death Generator

This is a case of a good idea getting lost behind a lousy name. The Death Generator is a website where you can create messages from all sorts of old (and new!) video games.

Just pick your game, enter your text, and Bob's your uncle.

Here's an example:

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World weather powered by DoINeedAJacket.com

do i need a jacket is the ultimate resource in knowing whether or not you need a jacket when you go out. no, not a dinner jacket. a jacket j

Site Spotlight: Do I Need a Jacket?

This is probably one of my favorite websites for weather forecasts. While it could spit out a ton of statistics and charts (like any other weather website), this one just asks whether or not you need a jacket, and provides a YES or NO answer.

Very clear, very simple, and a little bit silly.

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Video: 10 best pranks to pull on your not-so-tech savvy friends!

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LeVar Burton Reads: The Best Short Fiction, Handpicked by the Best Voice in Podcasting

Sunday Site Spotlight: Levar Burton Reads

Everyone loves listening to podcasts and audiobooks, so this is a definite must visit. The entire idea is that Levar Burton, the guy y’all know from Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, sits down and reads a short story. All you need to do is listen.

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Back in the day, when everyone was hanging out on niche websites, people could generally get away with broad judgement calls. We could say, for example, that people from Logan’s Angry Rodent Emporium were jerks, or that the owner of Granny Sweetums Cookie Forum was a despot, or that the folks over at Hell and War on Mars dot Violence were some of the nicest people you’d ever meet.

Nowadays, we stereotype social media sites based on their worst 1% of users. For example, Reddit has a truckload of interesting niche subsreddits, but you wouldn’t know that because the entire site is judged by the people in the donkey porn groups.

It’s kind of like saying that the human pet guy is your typical Tumblr user, or that the wonderbread guy was your typical Deviant Art user. Every site has its weirdos and bad apples, but it just seems wrong to label today’s social media the way we used to label backroads websites.

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Sunday Site Spotlight: F*CK the Presidents of the United States

This might be a bit more controversial than some of the stuff I’d normally link to, but if you’re willing to go down the road less travelled, you’re going to find oddities like this.

F*ck the POTUS is a website about the many people who have had the honor of being the President of the United States. Despite the name and apparent attitude towards them, it’s a collection of short biographies of each US President, including stuff they did during their term, how many votes they received during elections, and other random but interesting facts about them.

In fact, I’d say it’s a good source for research papers, though it might be a wee bit embarrassing to put this site’s name in your footnotes.

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I’ve been trying to think of ways of improving my site lately, and a couple of ideas have come to mind.

I watch a lot of YouTube. I mean, a LOT of YouTube. An embarrassingly large amount of YouTube. Currently I don’t link to anything on YouTube, since that’s just not how the site is designed. So I’ve been thinking of creating a section just to list the fun channels I find on there.

Another idea would be to create some more widgets. Currently there’s a dice roller and some converters, but I’ve been thinking of other things that might be useful, and maybe I could code some HTML5 games that folks can tinker with. Maybe. Javascript isn’t my strong suit.

Yet another idea would be specialty topic pages. Hand made lists, rather than the general search that’s there now. This would require some rearrangement of the scripts that run the site, but it might be worth it.

I’m open to ideas y’all.

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Oh hey, this is neat.

I finally got around to checking my site’s logs. Yeah, webmasters should do that regularly to make sure there aren’t any missing pages or other errors (there weren’t, fortunately).

Anyway, the exciting thing is that it had about 700 pageviews last month. That’s 700 pageviews by people, not bots.

Glad to see people are liking it!

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Mental health treatment, tips, and quizzes on conditions including: bipolar, anxiety, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, addiction, PTSD, and more.

Sunday Site Spotlight: PSYCOM.NET

A lot of people are dealing with poor mental health these days, and the prolonged quarantine hasn’t been much of a help. If you’re one of those people and need a big old masterpost of useful information, check out PSYCOM.NET .

Sure, it’s not as fun as some of the websites out there, but it’ll definitely help when things get tough.

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Best Programming Language For Me

Sunday Site Spotlight: Best Programming Language For Me

A lot of people who like spending their time on computers find themselves wanting to learn to program, but with the millions of programming languages out there, it can seem like an unsurmountable task to figure out how to get started.

This helpful site walks you through a series of questions, and then shows you sample code to let you work it out from there. Nifty!

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Sunday Site Spotlight: The Museum of the Stone Age

Now THIS is the short of thing I really wanted to find when I started up the Website Finder. It’s an old-school style website, designed to “feel” like a virtual museum tour!

Obviously, this museum focuses on the tools used by mankind’s ancient ancestors. You’ll find everything from essays on the types of stone tools people made and used, to galleries exhibiting various examples. Definitely worth a look for any fan of prehistory!