ASCIImator: Online ASCII Animator | Hacker News Reader

ASCIImator: Online ASCII Animator

asciimator.net

102 pointsfranze12 comments

Hello! I am actually the maintainer of the site, and an active user back in its heyday. It is largely kept in maintenance mode, as the codebase is reminiscent of the year 2006 (as was passed on to me from the creators - if not for a rewrite to use JSON for ASCIImations, it would probably still run fine on IE6...) and I do not have enough time to give it a proper cleanup.

The site is back up, and I'll try to ensure that for the near future - the VPS it's on is fairly low-end.

Note: I am aware that the main page is by far the slowest part of the website.

I'm sorry to say that it seems to be down again - getting 502 Gateway Timeout from nginx.

Oh, I see - MySQL is taking so long to process the queries that php-fpm runs out of free processes. Trying to "fix" it...

Update: I commented out most of the main page, but now at least the rest works. Yay. Needs caching. I'll add some when I come back home in four hours, nonetheless - this brave attempt at trying to resurrect the site's community made the whole thing collapse unexpectedly.

Worth signing up for CloudFlare's free plan, and setting a page rule to 'Cache everything'. That should help you a lot!

Except that CloudFlare is kind of evil: http://www.crimeflare.com/

Asie! Wow, it's been a while. Hard to believe it's been over nine years since I first signed up. A lovely little nostalgia trip for a lunch break. ~origamiguy

Wow, I love the one showing all 20 standard amino acids:

http://www.asciimator.net/asciimation/11130

Anyone old enough to remember TheDraw from BBS days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

Great project! This reminds me of the past where I created some ASCIImations, too:

http://asciimation.de/

Also, never forget the great, classic Star Wars ASCIImation:

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

Something related, vlc has a mode where one can play movies as ascii art. It even works through a terminal.

Sidenote: I wonder how many HNers actually checked the link before upvoting and how many didn't...

HN hit this hard. Down for now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com