zoetrope is a tool for building CSS demos. Imagine something like Codepen, except:

• It runs locally on your own computer
• You use your normal text editor
• You can't add any HTML or JS. Only CSS.

That last one is super important. CSS demos that depend on JavaScript or lots of little helper <div /> elements are great, but I think it's also fun to try without that stuff, and get creative within the boundaries of what CSS can do all on its own. Working with PICO-8 taught me how platform constraints can actually inspire creativity rather than stifle it. zoetrope is a way for me to bridge the gap and try to bring some of that thinking into the stuff I do on the web.

This is more of a personal tool, and not really intended for widespread public adoption. It's open source because it might as well be, and it has this documentation because I don't like open sourcing things without any. You're more than welcome to give it a try, and I'd be really excited if anybody did. But that's not really the goal here!

Installation

yarn add -D @hendotcat/zoetrope

Usage

 zoetrope <command>

 Commands
   help    print this help text
   build   build static site
   server  run development server

I wanted to optimize out as much tooling boilerplate as possible from my workflow, so zoetrope pulls all the metadata it needs to build a demo from package.json. Check out the package.json for my doomfire demo for example. Most of the values in there are actually used in the built version of the demo at https://hen.cat/doomfire. I'm not going to document the setup process in detail, but if you do want to try out zoetrope for yourself then go and browse around that repository for a moment.

Contributing

License

MIT