Postcards — shareable ANSI/PETSCII art
Any logged-in user (not just admins) can compose retro CP437 art in
the browser and get back a public, no-login share page plus a real
downloadable PNG — something that pastes cleanly into a social media
post, unlike a terminal screenshot.
This is a separate, user-facing feature from the admin ANSI
Editor (/admin/ansi/, see 04-ansi-screens.md)
even though it's built on the exact same grid-editing engine. The
ANSI Editor manages official, admin-curated BBS assets (menu banners,
welcome/goodbye screens); Postcards is regular users making their own
shareable art. The two are kept in separate database tables
(AnsiArt vs Postcard) specifically so a flood of user postcards
never clutters the admin art library sysops use to manage real BBS
assets.
Using it
Tools → My Stuff → Postcards (/postcards/, requires login).
"New Postcard" opens the same pencil/line/rect/fill/text/undo-redo
grid editor as the admin ANSI Editor. Save, then click "Share Page"
to get:
- A public link (
/postcards/<slug>) anyone can open — no BBS
account needed to view it. - A downloadable PNG (
/postcards/<slug>.png), rendered server-side
from the same vendored VGA font used throughout the BBS's retro
styling, upscaled with nearest-neighbor so it stays crisp rather
than blurring a pixel font. - A downloadable
.ansfile, compatible with Pablo Draw / Moebius /
SyncTERM.
Only the postcard's own creator (or an admin) can edit or delete it.
Viewing, downloading the PNG, and downloading the .ans are all
public with no login — that's the entire point of a shareable link.
No feature flag
Unlike Watch It Live and the social-posting queue, Postcards has no
on/off switch — it doesn't broaden any existing data's exposure the
way those two do (a user is choosing, per-postcard, to publish
something), so there's nothing to default off.
Related files
anetbbs/web/postcards.py— the blueprint.anetbbs/templates/ansi_editor/_editor_widget.html— the shared
grid-editor engine (CSS + canvas/tools panel + JS), included by both
the admin ANSI Editor and Postcards so there is exactly one copy of
the editing logic, not two that can drift apart.anetbbs/features/ansi_png.py— the grid-to-PNG renderer.anetbbs/models.py'sPostcardmodel.