Fancy Curl Sites
A developer shares their process for creating a terminal-based, 'curl-able' version of their blog using ANSI escape codes. The post explains how they manually marked up content to allow users to view their website directly in a command-line interface.
Why it matters
This reflects a niche interest in retro-computing and terminal-based web accessibility, showcasing creative ways to present digital content.
So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!
curl nytpu.com/gemlog/2026-03-18 # or curl nytpu.com (sorry Windows users, not my fault that ANSI escape codes are disabled-by-default in cmd.exe . And not my fault that in Powershell you have to use curl.exe instead of curl because Powershell inexplicably aliases that to Invoke-WebRequest .)
I posted about it a bit on the Fediverse, but otherwise didn't elaborate much on it becuase I figured it was fairly self-explanatory. But I've had a handful of people ask me how I did it, so I decided it might actually be worth it to write a post about how I did it (…like seven months late).
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