It’s a pixel editor, so you’re working very much zoomed in. The image this exported is tiny by comparison. I’ve got the UI zoomed in too because my eyes stink. You create frames to animate and can use layers for keeping elements separate. It’s got all the basic paint tools you’d expect, and goes pretty deep on features in some areas.

88x31 buttons were popular back in the days of Geocities.

Here is the .asperite file, and below is the final product rendered to GIF. You can see in the screen shot above, there’s a faded sunburst that throbs in and out with the animation, but its so small you can’t really see it.

I’d like to try some art with it next. Maybe reproduce some album cover art in pixel form…

So this site is now hosted on an old ThinkPad E430 that I use as a home Linux server for a handful of sites and some self-hosted apps. They all use a Cloudflare tunnel to expose an otherwise network-isolated nginx server to the Internet. This is a fantastic free service that let’s anyone host public Internet endpoints from a device not directly exposed to the Internet.

I found this Blocksy theme, which allows me to do Twitter-style posts — no title with content fully displayed in the post list — alongside traditional posts with a title and “more” line. It took a few tweaks to get things working as I like them, but so far not a line of code has been written. I expect I’ll get my hands in there and customize this with a child theme at some point. But for now, I can focus on content, which was the whole point. I’ll keep the About page updated with technical details around the site implementation.