ASCII Art

asciiart.eu as jaime's data source — site structure, the card format the scraper reads, and the attribution contract.

ASCII Art

The Composition Room's ASCII-art panel is backed by a one-time scrape of asciiart.eu into jaime's own database. The app never calls asciiart.eu at runtime — every piece shown in the panel was fetched once, ahead of time, and served from jaime's D1 database from then on. This page documents that source and the contract jaime keeps with it.

Site structure

asciiart.eu organizes its collection as a two-level tree:

26 top-level category pages (animals, computers, movies, space, video-games, …) — pure indexes, no art on the page itself, each linking to several leaf subcategory pages.
355 leaf subcategory pages (e.g. animals/aardvarks, movies/star-wars) — each renders every piece in that subcategory inline, with no pagination.

Individual pieces also have a permalink at /art/<id>, but that route is client-side only (for sharing a specific piece) — the scraper never fetches it, since every field it needs is already present on the subcategory listing page.

The card format

Each piece on a subcategory page is one .art-card element:

<div class="card art-card"
     data-id="bfde1f001b31bbe7"
     data-title="Sleeping aardvarko"
     data-artist="Win Kang"
     data-width="60"
     data-height="4"
     data-views="…">
  <div class="art-card__ascii">…raw ASCII text…</div>
</div>

data-id is the site's own identifier — jaime reuses it verbatim as the primary key, rather than generating a new one, so a piece's identity matches its source. title and artist are sometimes missing (a piece can be untitled, or credited to no one); jaime stores those as NULL rather than inventing a placeholder string. data-width / data-height are the piece's character-grid dimensions — how many columns and rows of monospace text it occupies — which the panel uses client-side to fit each piece to the available space without measuring the text itself.

What jaime stores

Table ascii_art in the shared PATTERNS_DB (migration 0007_ascii_gallery.sql):

Column	Type	Notes
`id`	`TEXT`	Primary key — the site's own `data-id`.
`title`	`TEXT`	Nullable.
`artist`	`TEXT`	Nullable.
`category`	`TEXT`	e.g. `animals`.
`subcategory`	`TEXT`	e.g. `aardvarks`.
`width`	`INTEGER`	Character columns.
`height`	`INTEGER`	Character rows.
`text`	`TEXT`	The raw ASCII art.
`source_url`	`TEXT`	`https://www.asciiart.eu/art/<id>`.
`scraped_at`	`TEXT`	ISO timestamp of the crawl.

As of the last crawl: 4,380 pieces across all 26 categories and 355 subcategories.

Two read endpoints serve this table: GET /api/ascii-art/random?count=<n>&category=<c> (a batch — the panel fetches once and cycles through it locally rather than hitting the API on every beat) and GET /api/ascii-art/[id] (a direct lookup, mainly for the attribution link below).

Attribution

asciiart.eu asks that attribution travel with any reuse of a piece. jaime honors that in the panel itself: every piece shown carries a small title — artist link, pinned to the bottom of the panel and pointing at that piece's source_url — the one interactive element in an otherwise click-through overlay. It updates on every swap, to match whichever piece is currently shown.

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