I knew Joan from the newsgroup but I have not found her online since she left the ASCII art newsgroup/ community. I think of her often, at least as often as I still see her ASCII art ripped off online. She has a style I can almost always spot, even if someone has removed or changed the artist initials with her art.

Her kids will be grown up now and she won’t be fighting for computer time. I hope life has gone along well for her, where ever she is.

Joan G. Stark’s Original ASCII

Believe it or not, I “discovered” ASCII art in winter of 1995. I think I saw a tiny bicycle made in ascii characters and was totally amazed by it. I joked that someone must have had too much time on their hands! But still I was in awe of it… I didn’t even know what it was called. After e-mailing several friends, I found out that it was called “ASCII art”. It was then that I found the USENET newsgroup alt.ascii-art and started lurking to find more of these computer pictures.

I then started collecting as much of the ASCII art as I could. I began wandering through the internet and realized that there was way too much to save. I would forget my idea of having a huge collection… I know where to find the pictures if I want something.

Being a “crafty” type person, I decided that I would try to make the ASCII pictures myself. I’ve always like to doodle on paper, so I figured it couldn’t be that much different. My first project was to make a signature for me to use. I started diddling around with the keyboard in May/June of 1996 by doing lettering. Someone then told me about “FIGLET”. For those of you who don’t know, FIGLET is a computer program that creates fancy lettering from text. Hearing about figlet took the thrill away from making the fonts- I could spend an hour creating an alphabet by hand and someone else could just press a computer key and have the letters pop up “pre-made”.

And so I went on to the pictures… I know that there are programs available to create ASCII art — (I don’t know that much about them…) — but the programs usually create solid-type ASCII art. Even then, the pictures still are pretty rough and need touch-ups to make them aesthetically correct. I have collected some conversion software information from alt.ascii-art and offer them to you– no guarantees– .

I make the line-style ASCII pictures and I don’t believe that there are programs for this style. Basically I sit down at the keyboard and start typing.

OK– so I can’t consider myself a “newbie” at ASCII art any more. The honeymoon is over! I’ve been making the pics since 1996. Some people are anticipating my “burn-out”– but I continue to make the ASCII art pictures and I still look forward to improving. I’d like to be able to look at each of my creations and say “wow!”– there are some that I like a lot and there are some that I consider “ok”. Most of the crummy ones have met their demise at the hands of the delete button. Despite this, I’ve included some of my early works in this gallery so you can see how my artwork has evolved. Perhaps I may inspire other budding ascii artists…

I am just amazed at all ASCII artwork. There are a limited number of characters available on the keyboard and they are all fixed. Considering this fact, it is truly remarkable that there are so many different ASCII art pictures.

I don’t know how long ASCII art has been around. I’ve been told that it dates back at least to the 1960s when computers consisted only of large main frames. There were no PCs and no monitors. Transmissions were done through terminals that were very much like electric typewriters. Games and pictures were done in ASCII. (Remember the original “Zork”?) Some of the pictures passed around then are still being passed around today. See History of ASCII Art.

For me, the ASCII art is still pretty new … although I remember as a kid, my father would take me to work with him on an occasional Saturday. While there, I would play on the secretary’s typewriter and make pictures on a sheet of paper using commas and lines– my “first” ASCII drawings!. (I would also link all of her paper clips together– shhh, don’t tell my dad!). I had a lot of fun those weekend mornings… I guess you could say that I’ve been making text art — even before computers! :)

But times have changed! Gone are the typewriters, papers, and carbon copies. I doodle as I did as a child… but now I don’t need a new sheet of paper or white-out when I make a mistake. Sigh… and my children have already connected my paper clips together! :( But that’s OK, I don’t need them! :) I just have to fight the kids for computer time!

Source: About Joan Stark

So much is still lost, gone and unretrievable. Software changes, sites that close with no/little notice, people deciding what does matter and what does not based on what seemed to matter at that time. I've lost quite a lot of what I have written over the years I've been online. The Wayback Machine has some of it. Not all. Of course, not every word, thought, image, or news has value worth keeping for however long. But, once its gone it isn't likely to be found again.

It is still funny, in an interesting way, that all of it, saved or not, is just code. The science of having so much created based on 1 and 0 is still amazing.

In the 01990s, when we first started really talking about the issues of digital storage media and file format obsolescence, it was almost as if we were caught with our pants down. We hadn’t truly been thinking about this as a problem; we as a civilization weren’t prepared for the challenges it posed. We soon realized, however, that digital documents have their own complex fragility and maintaining access to digitally encoded information over the long-term may be more challenging than the analog. There was a flurry of activity across the globe, and while the topic faded from the headlines, the flurry of activity continued and has slowly and steadily gained momentum.

Source: #nodigitaldarkage? — Blog of the Long Now - Heather Ryan.

I've been interested in keeping old content and what happens to content once the source is gone, for a long time. In particular, web content, since the days I was an editor with the Open Directory Project. I liked finding sites which disappeared. Often I could find them again, on their own domain or from their own domain to a free service like Blogger. I liked tracking them down. It was an adventure and something I could feel pleased about. Not every site could be found again. Often, they were abandoned too. Content still there but no one maintaining it.

There are so many other issues when it comes to preserving online/ web content. Consider the web host the site is on. When payments to the host stop it isn't long before the domain expires and the site will go missing. What happens to your own sites, social media and whatever else you've got, if you die? I think about that too. Mine would all just be gone and not all that missed. But, I've written it mostly for myself and my own satisfaction, something new to learn.

I've got archives of ASCII art. Loads of it but all a mess, not organized. I try to sort it but soon decide my methods are not working well and no one will actually find anything. Plus, there is the problem of how to display it. ASCII art works in plain text files but does not show up on an HTML site (very well or easily) that way. I've had people bitch, complaining that it isn't really ASCII art if it's shown in an image file versus plain text. Well, whine on, but you don't have the headache of trying to make it work.

Anyway, so much for keeping on point...

I'd like to know more about how web content is being archived and what people are doing with the content they save. How is it being stored? Is it viewable by anyone? What about copyrights? So many questions... 

The Association of Canadian Archivists

What are reasons to keep an archive on your blog? We have categories and tags. An archive may seem a bit prehistoric or overkill, especially when they aren't search able and just sit there all static and growing old. Tony Briley started this discussion on the CMF Ads forum.

Reasons for keeping an archive on your blog:

• Web directories tend to list established blogs only, those which are at least six months old. An archive is where they look to find the age of your blog.
• Knowing the age of your blog establishes your credentials, your experience, especially if you are posting about web publishing related topics like SEO, blogging and making money online.
• Some readers prefer to read a blog which has some staying power, has passed the test of time and kept going.
• If people want to flip to a certain date in your blog they need an archive. For instance, to see what you were posting about a year ago, or what you posted on a holiday, or some other eventful day.
• An archive shows all the posts from the month on one page. You can do the same with categories but, not by date.
• Your readers can go back to see how you started. What your thoughts and plans and goals were right from the beginning of your blog project. Who was commenting then? How has your writing style, your way of expressing yourself changed? Also, have you changed the focus of your blog and the topics you cover?
• You may have undertaken a special project which readers would like to track back and go through the journey day by day, as it happened (through the archives). This is not just something for personal bloggers. If you post a series of posts on a topic they can also be read as an ongoing journey.
• I also keep an archive for myself. I like to skim back and see where I was, what ideas I had in the past. I don't look by topic (category or tags) cause that isn't as random as looking into your past by time machine alone. Often something I posted a couple of years ago inspires me for an update on the same topic or a completely new angle on what I was thinking then.

Reasons to get rid of the archive on your blog:

• Your blog is very new and you don't want to broadcast that.
• You want to cut down on clutter in every way you can and the archive just seems to take up more space than it is worth.

What's your opinion? Archive or not?