I created today a Google Group titled “ASCII and ANSI Text Art”, but it is open to anything and anybody who and which is related to Text Art. For that reason is the short name and URL to the group “textart” instead of “asciiart” or “ansiart”. ASCII and ANSI text art Visit this group ?? Subscribe to ASCII and ANSI text art Email: Visit this group Those templates were provided by Google hehe. I created already a little resources page and also started a discussion about something that has always been a controversy. I will not tell you what that is, go check out the group and find out for yourself. A number of XML feeds are also available for anybody who can not live without. ?? ?? Atom 1.0 15 New messages50 New messages15 New topics50 New topics ?? RSS 2.0 15 New messages50 New messages15 New topics50 New topics ?? Lets see how it goes. Cheers! Carsten aka Roy/SAC
I came across a nice free tool that converts images to ASCII. It is called Photo2Text.com and produces very decent results. I have looked at a bunch of such converters since the early nineties and the results can vary a lot, depending on the quality of the algorithm that has to decide which text character is the best to get it as close to the original as it possibly can. I was never a fan on image to text converters. Mostly because those converters were and are often used by guys who are cheats and try to “sell” converted images as their own creation, as in made from scratch and by hand. Real pieces of ASCII art are being created without the use of any special tools other than editors that allow to assign text characters to specific keys on the keyboard and let you easier move around to change individual characters (“insert” off and the ability to move with the cursor to the right without the need to create “spaces” manually first). A number of different tools are available for download at my site.Anyhow, I take the converters as what they are, a nice tool to have fun with, nothing serious. Nothing is wrong with good old fashioned fun. The only person who is serious about it, is the coder who spent his time figuring out how to produce the best possible result.To demonstrate the quality of the Photo2Text.com converter, did I use an image of the Google engineer[…]
Something else was even longer on my to-do list than the post about leveraging sites like deviantART for online marketing. It has been on my list for over one year now and I also got finally around to do it. What am I talking about? The article to the PCBoard BBS Software at Wikipedia. I extended the article significantly and also added a photo of the box of the software, which I took myself with my digital camera. You can see the picture here in the post as well. For the folks who don’t know, I used to run a BBS myself called “Closed Society”. I wrote about it on the homepage of my RoySAC.com website. I used as BBS Software PCBoard. First via multiple PC’s under MS DOS and then all Notes on one machine running under IBM OS/2 Warp. The BBS was up 24/7 for over 2 years in my one bedroom studio. Did the noise of the running computers bother me when I was asleep? Actually quite the opposite. I had a problem sleeping when the BBS was shut down and offline. PCBoard was a great software and the best thing about it was the availability of its own script language to change the look, feel and behavior of the BBS. I wrote and published a bunch of tools myself. You can download all of them here. I launched the BBS shorty after SAC was founded. The existence of the BBS did cause me to create more[…]
It was a post that was several months in the making. I was having it on my to-do list for months, but was finally able to finish and publish it. I am not talking about a post here, but at my Blog at ReveNews.com, which is related to internet and affiliate marketing. The blog post I did is titled “User Generated Advertising Web 2.0 Style” and is about leveraging communities like deviantART.com for your business. deviantART is a great place for businesses who want to do “different” advertising, 100% Web 2.0 style. I suggested the use of dA design contests to have artists create designs for any kind of thing you can come up with. I explained the benefits like this: You engage people, inspire creativity and get authentic designs, which are honest and pure. It could be a web 2.0 style advertising campaign, very viral (speaking of buzz marketing). It’s a pretty long post, but I recommend to read it, if you are interested in this sort of things. I did a contest at deviantART myself last year. It was not a design contest, but it was a contest to promote my Text art site RoySAC.com a little bit. I blogged about it too. I hope this provides some inspiration. Just think outside the box from time to time and try out new things. This is true no matter what you are doing. Cheers! Carsten aka Roy/SAC
I am a Wikipedian since December 2005. I wrote about how that happened back in April.I did over 2000 edits in Wikipedia since then, mostly articles and other things that are either related to internet marketing or to the Demoscene and Text art. I did a lot of work on the articles to affiliate marketing and the article to ASCII art.I try for a long time to get other affiliate marketers to contribute to Wikipedia to that subject, but my attempts are not bearing any fruits so far. In addition, my major rant last month was not as successful as I had hoped. I hope that it will change eventually.But there are also good news. The article to search engine optimization was promoted to ???featured article??? at Wikipedia. I did contribute some stuff to the article and was always watching it for spammers and vandals. I was also active in discussions on the articles talk page. What does featured article mean? Here is what Wikipedia itself says, quote: Featured articles in WikipediaFeatured articles are considered to be the best articles in Wikipedia, as determined by Wikipedia’s editors. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style according to our featured article criteria.At present, there are 1,420 featured articles, of a total of 1,815,298 articles on Wikipedia. Thus, about one in 1,270 articles is listed here. Articles that no longer meet the criteria can be proposed for improvement or removal at Wikipedia:Featured article[…]