Saturday May 11, 2002

The Asciimation Community

As you can see from the links section, there are other people crazy enough to get involved in making animations out of punctuation characters. There is even a Usenet newsgroup (alt.ascii-art.animation), but this mainly consists of Spam, and off-topic posts about Flash animation.

Phydeaux tried to mobilise the 'community' to create a collaborative asciimation project. This got a fair bit of support, but the project appears to be on hold. I think in the mean time it would be nice to have a community page to present and discuss works of any size and theme, and I'm going to code this into the Chickenman site as soon as I get time.

The idea is that any Asciimator would be able to register for an 'account' here. This would give them a page to describe their interests, home page, email etc., and also a hierarchy of sub-pages where they could upload .jmov files to this server. Anyone could then browse to those asciimators' animations. I'd probably also want to add a guestbook/chat script that can handle discussions on any of these animations. (I have the bare bones of this, but needs some more work...)

The steps:

1. Create the 'register' script that creates the animator's main page and directory structure.
2. Create the upload script that uploads the .jmov, checks that it's valid, and creates the view page.
3. Update the guestbook/chat script so that it handles each animation separately.
4. Create administrative scripts that allow the animator to edit the information provided (both on main page, and the individual animations)
5. Create a what's new script.

As .jmov can be quite happily zipped, I think I can set the maximum limit for each movie quite low (none of mine zip to more than 10K, but I could set it to 25K to start off with), so this shouldn't be too much load on the server even in the unlikely event that it turns out to be a popular service...

I'd imagine that the coding would take about a week of weeknights, which right now isn't going to happen, as it isn't my main priority. I'd guess I might be able to spend a night a week, and possibly release this in a month or two.

Comments welcome.