ascii.football
On a slow day at work in 2024, I found this Reddit post. For the readers too lazy to click a link, it describes a simple but elegant little website called ascii.bike. This website left a lasting impression on me because little secrets and novelties such as this used to be what the internet was all about. It used to have a personal, handcrafted feel, but now it feels cold and corporate. “The internet needs more websites like ascii.bike,” I concluded.
I decided to take action.
The Journey Begins
My journey began by searching the list of top level domains for a suitable noun that wasn't taken. It was surprisingly hard to find an ASCII domain that wasn't already taken. It seems a lot of people are sadly hoarding them. Perhaps if greed was not so inherently human, I would have an army of ASCII websites. But for now, I must make do with just ascii.football.
With the domain secured, I rented out an extra small VPS from Ionos for cheap (not sponsored) and I immediately encountered my first hurdle - they charged me twice! After resolving this issue in about half an hour on call with a customer support guy, he asked out of interest what I would do with such a small VPS. I told him my plan and he thought it was stupid. Fair enough, I didn't care. I installed Debian and NGINX, uploaded my (someone else's) ASCII art, and ascii.football was up and running.
The Journey Ends
After finishing my creation, I presented it to a commenter named u/JCPseudo on that original post from a since-deleted account. Needless to say, he was impressed.
Nowadays, ascii.football lives on the Raspberry Pi 2B+ on my desk - the same place I host this blog.
You can see the finished product here.
Fin.