ASCII Social

Second Pass At Characters

Three months after the first attempt I started over. January 2024, Next.js 14, asciify-image instead of image-to-ascii.

The idea was the same: a social feed where every post is ASCII art. The October version leaned on GraphicsMagick, which meant installing a real binary alongside the app, so I swapped the conversion library to see if that was what was getting in the way.

Neither run got past conversion. No feed, no accounts, no posting, just the step that turns a picture into a grid of characters. That's the fun part though. Most of how good ASCII art looks comes down to the sampling and the character ramp, and every library does those differently, so I ran my own pictures through them to see.

I don't usually come back to an idea twice in one winter. This one kept nagging me.