Here's a quick guide on how to create ASCII art in posts on sites like Reddit, forums, email and elsewhere.
ASCII art has been around for decades now. This site provides a very nice summation of the history of ASCII art, including its beginnings in hieroglyphics, monasteries, and finally on computer screens. You can find ASCII art online today in the form of emoticons, and also at various sites (like this one) that have compiled all kinds of ASCII art creations for your enjoyment.
Creating most ASCII art relies mainly on using a fixed-width font, such as Courier New. Doing so ensures that your work will look the same when rendered by the browser or email client or whatever medium as it does in whatever tool you're using to create it, because each character has a set width, a set number of pixels that it occupies.
Many text editing widgets on websites and email clients give you the option of picking what font to use. For purposes of ASCII art, pick a fixed-width font. Then, begin crafting your design. You can also simply copy-and-paste someone else's ASCII art, like this cupcake, for example, but if you do so, it's best to keep any attribution the artist might've tagged their creation with (thanks Krogg, whoever you are):
)
(.)
.|.
l7J
| |
_.--| |--._
.-'; ;`-'& ; `&.
& & ; & ; ; \
\ ; & &_/
F"""---...---"""J
| | | | | | | | |
J | | | | | | | F
`---.|.|.|.---'
Krogg
Many forums have a WYSIWYG text-editor that lets you pick from a variety of fonts. In those cases, you can typically create your art in any text editor (I use Notepad++) then copy-and-paste it into the forum's editor, and then highlight the text and then change the font to apply fixed-width formatting.
Email clients, too, usually have WYSIWYG editors. Microsoft Outlook, for example, can be configured to use Word to create emails, allowing for great flexibility in formatting. For email messages, you can simply configure your email client to use a fixed-width font like Courier New, or alternatively change the email format it uses to plain text, rather than HTML or Rich Text; by default many email clients will render incoming such email messages in a fixed-width font, saving you some guesswork about whether the ASCII art will appear as intended.
Specific to Reddit, their text editor doesn't let you choose what font to use, beyond the font selections you choose for your web browser, but they do enable you to use a fixed width font by preceding each line of text with four blank spaces. Users in the programming field will sometimes post programming code, and while this feature is particularly suited to that purpose, it can also help you break up an otherwise serious discussion with some frivolous ASCII art creation.
To reproduce the above cupcake ASCII art on Reddit, then, you'd simply copy-and-paste the above into a new post or comment on Reddit, then copy a set of four blank spaces and paste them in front of each line of the cupcake. Then when Reddit displays the text, it will apply formatting rules and display the cupcake in fixed width font for everyone's enjoyment. Here's an example.
Unfortunately, some sites like Facebook won't allow you to choose your own font, their text formatting is very limited. However, you could simply host either a plain ASCII text file or an HTML document on a free web host like Awardspace. Then, simply refer your friends to the URL for that page to show them your creation.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
ImageShack, I Am Disappoint
ImageShack is one of many free online image hosting services.
Up until recently it's been one of my favorites because it allows you to easily copy a simple direct link to an image you've hosted. This allows you to link someone directly to a given image without any clutter, just the image by itself.
As of a week or two ago, however, they've disabled their Direct Link textbox and insist that you register with their site for this privilege. Sure, you can still freely obtain the Link code, which will show the image plus some minimal markup of ImageShack itself, and you can still copy various forum, thumbnail, widget and other markup for the image you wish to host, but really, most often I just want the image alone, that's all, nothing else.
I freely admit it, I am a cheapskate.
There are several workarounds for this annoyance.
First of all, you could simply visit another image hosting provider like imgur and use their service instead. Of course, you could sign up and create a user account with ImageShack; obviously ImageShack is in favor of this option. Another option is to visit BugMeNot and borrow somebody else's credentials. If, however, you yearn for ImageShack prior to their shenanigans, you can still obtain the Direct Link through this relatively convoluted series of steps:
I'm certainly not enough of a die-hard fan of ImageShack that I would go to the trouble of digging into the HTML to grab that direct link each time, so I guess the easiest option is to just use another provider from here on out. Perhaps this will lead to a similar backlash to the infamous Gizmodo design change, which caused a significant reduction in visits to their site?
Yet another example of how a seemingly small change to the user experience can prompt users to seek an alternative.
Up until recently it's been one of my favorites because it allows you to easily copy a simple direct link to an image you've hosted. This allows you to link someone directly to a given image without any clutter, just the image by itself.
As of a week or two ago, however, they've disabled their Direct Link textbox and insist that you register with their site for this privilege. Sure, you can still freely obtain the Link code, which will show the image plus some minimal markup of ImageShack itself, and you can still copy various forum, thumbnail, widget and other markup for the image you wish to host, but really, most often I just want the image alone, that's all, nothing else.
I freely admit it, I am a cheapskate.
There are several workarounds for this annoyance.
First of all, you could simply visit another image hosting provider like imgur and use their service instead. Of course, you could sign up and create a user account with ImageShack; obviously ImageShack is in favor of this option. Another option is to visit BugMeNot and borrow somebody else's credentials. If, however, you yearn for ImageShack prior to their shenanigans, you can still obtain the Direct Link through this relatively convoluted series of steps:
1. Upload an image to ImageShack as usual.
2. Right-click on the Upload Successful page and view source.
3. Copy the direct URL to your image, and paste it wherever you like.
Why ImageShack chose to do this, I don't know. I've used their Direct Link for years, why they would choose to implement this, particularly when so many other image hosting sites like imgur continue to offer a plain URL to your hosted image, is a mystery to me.
I'm certainly not enough of a die-hard fan of ImageShack that I would go to the trouble of digging into the HTML to grab that direct link each time, so I guess the easiest option is to just use another provider from here on out. Perhaps this will lead to a similar backlash to the infamous Gizmodo design change, which caused a significant reduction in visits to their site?
Yet another example of how a seemingly small change to the user experience can prompt users to seek an alternative.
LogMeIn Laptop Screen Stays Blank After Remote Session
LogMeIn is an excellent online service which offers a free method of remotely controlling a PC via web browser.
Recently I encountered a minor glitch, however, and whether LogMeIn or Windows 7 or nVidia are the culprit, I'm not sure.
I had remoted in to my Dell Latitude E6410 laptop using the latest free version of LogMeIn. It is equipped with Windows 7 64-bit and NVIDIA NVS 3100M display adapter, each with the latest updates and drivers available.
All seemed fine via remote, but when I returned to the office I found that although my secondary monitor activated normally, my laptop display remained seemingly asleep and unresponsive. I tried using the key combination of the Windows key and P then clicked Extend to try to have Windows reinitialize the displays and wake everything up, but no joy.
I then tried just changing one of my Display settings, the Resolution, to a different value in order to have Windows enable the Apply button, and then clicked it.
After doing this, my laptop screen was no longer blank.
Recently I encountered a minor glitch, however, and whether LogMeIn or Windows 7 or nVidia are the culprit, I'm not sure.
I had remoted in to my Dell Latitude E6410 laptop using the latest free version of LogMeIn. It is equipped with Windows 7 64-bit and NVIDIA NVS 3100M display adapter, each with the latest updates and drivers available.
All seemed fine via remote, but when I returned to the office I found that although my secondary monitor activated normally, my laptop display remained seemingly asleep and unresponsive. I tried using the key combination of the Windows key and P then clicked Extend to try to have Windows reinitialize the displays and wake everything up, but no joy.
I then tried just changing one of my Display settings, the Resolution, to a different value in order to have Windows enable the Apply button, and then clicked it.
After doing this, my laptop screen was no longer blank.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Blogger Blog Post Title Optimization
I've blogged with Blogger for a few years now, and overall it's worked pretty smoothly, but the blog post title can be a bit awkward to work with.
You'll notice that if your post title is particularly long, the resulting URL will get truncated once the post is published to a maximum length of roughly 39 characters. Spaces will be replaced with dashes, stop words like "to", "and", "of" will be filtered, and punctuation will be omitted.
Principles of SEO demand that blog posts are crafted such that search engines will return links to them as relevant hits for a given search. In addition, it is helpful to make it so that the blog post title is similar to the actual URL of the post.
In a Blogger blog, you can optimize your blog post titles by first deciding on a title which is both meaningful and concise. The title should reflect the content of the post, to make it easier for search engines (particularly Google) to categorize what you're blogging about, and decide how high up in the search results to place it.
For example, if the title of your post is "How To Make Lots Of Money By Blogging On Random Topics" (which is 54 characters without quotes), try to distill the essence of your post into a title which meets or is under the 39 character limit, perhaps "Make Money Blogging Random Topics" (33 characters) or "HowTo Make Money Blogging Randomly" (34 characters).
Ideally, you want the post title to meet that character limit for Blogger post titles, but sometimes it's difficult, particularly with stop words and spaces eating of valuable post title real estate.
To mitigate this, you can try the following steps:
After doing this, you'll discover that Blogger keeps the concise title's wording in the URL, but in the post itself it will have your verbose title.
Again, it's probably best that the title be the same in both the URL and the actual post title, but if you just can't do your post justice by pruning it below 39 characters, you can at least ensure that the post URL meets that requirement and yet retains value from an SEO standpoint.
You'll notice that if your post title is particularly long, the resulting URL will get truncated once the post is published to a maximum length of roughly 39 characters. Spaces will be replaced with dashes, stop words like "to", "and", "of" will be filtered, and punctuation will be omitted.
Principles of SEO demand that blog posts are crafted such that search engines will return links to them as relevant hits for a given search. In addition, it is helpful to make it so that the blog post title is similar to the actual URL of the post.
In a Blogger blog, you can optimize your blog post titles by first deciding on a title which is both meaningful and concise. The title should reflect the content of the post, to make it easier for search engines (particularly Google) to categorize what you're blogging about, and decide how high up in the search results to place it.
For example, if the title of your post is "How To Make Lots Of Money By Blogging On Random Topics" (which is 54 characters without quotes), try to distill the essence of your post into a title which meets or is under the 39 character limit, perhaps "Make Money Blogging Random Topics" (33 characters) or "HowTo Make Money Blogging Randomly" (34 characters).
Ideally, you want the post title to meet that character limit for Blogger post titles, but sometimes it's difficult, particularly with stop words and spaces eating of valuable post title real estate.
To mitigate this, you can try the following steps:
- Create a blog post with as brief a title as possible.
- Publish the post with the brief title.
- Immediately after publishing, Edit your post and modify the title to your original, more verbose version.
After doing this, you'll discover that Blogger keeps the concise title's wording in the URL, but in the post itself it will have your verbose title.
Again, it's probably best that the title be the same in both the URL and the actual post title, but if you just can't do your post justice by pruning it below 39 characters, you can at least ensure that the post URL meets that requirement and yet retains value from an SEO standpoint.
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