Splog or ASCII Art

Further down the road of not provoking management, this "cartoon" is just a nonsensical, artsy type. I have been interested in doing some kind of ASCII art, i.e. "pictures" made up from letters or characters, not drawn in conventional digital way. I also want to bring attention to splogs, or spam blogs, which are fake blogs that invade blogosphere to ruin the fun for everyone. In this case, my "pictures" are simply the five letters that spell out "splog".

I made the ASCII art in NeoOffice, the open source contender to Microsoft Office's throne. For the text, I started by copying from my own blog then use NeoOffice's overwrite feature to add white spaces to the text to create the letters. Then to make the text appears splog-like, I randomly added advertisements words and phrases that are often associated to spams, splogs, or other undesirable facets of the Internet. I also threw in phrases to praise myself or mention The Down Side Of Computing. To make the pictures, I saved the NeoOffice document to PDF then read the PDF into Photoshop. Page by page, I cropped the picture, added a white layer, then flatten the images. Lastly, I set contrast to 50% to make the black text jumps out of the page more.

Using just Blogger's edit mode wasn't enough. It was really difficult to arrange the pictures with the text. I am no expert with coding HTML tables, so I started a new table in Nvu then pasted the code into Blogger's Edit HTML page. In the end, I settled for a table of one row and five columns. The pictures run off the page so please pan over to the right to see the pictures together.