CSS Background Patterns

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With my 12 Days of CSS-mas, I’ve had need for patterned backgrounds made from pure CSS. I’ve found a couple of great sources which seem to cover the gamut of possibility.

Lea Verou’s extremely popular CSS3 Patterns Gallery (also on GitHub) has pretty much every pattern you would need, and you can edit them right in the page to adjust to your liking. This is my go-to for CSS background patterns.

TechGlimpse’s editable CSS pattern gallery contains about half a dozen other patterns that aren’t in Lea’s gallery. Maybe I should do a pull request…in my spare damned time amirite? =D

An honorable mention is Patternify, although this utilizes data URIs by default and that extra HTTP request isn’t ideal in many situations, this also allows you to create your own patterns and save them as a PNG.

Stuff I read 11/22/15-12/4/15

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The holiday week of course prevented me from posting, and this week was the last week in my current term at school so I had final projects and other assignments to wrap up. TLDR: there are 2 weeks worth of shit I read here. Smashing!

I’m also playing around with different highlight themes (most interesting, most weird, etc), since I don’t always have something super weird or whatever. Just think of it as A/B testing. You’re part of science!

Most (potentially) controversial things I read this timeframe:

Weirdest things I read this timeframe:

Most interesting things I read this timeframe:

Stuff I read 11/15/15-11/21/15

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I read a lot. No, I mean a lot. I’d love to say that I read intelligent, relevant articles all the time, but…that’s not entirely true. I read about anything that catches my fancy, from local media to Wikipedia to personal blogs to trashy 24 hour news sites, I read them all.

I decided that it would be beneficial for myself and others to share some of those articles with you, the good people of the interwebs. And getting links to some external content is never a bad idea. I started to organize them, but then I realized I didn’t give a shit. Embrace the randomness that is what I read in the past 7 days!

 

Weirdest thing I read this week:

 

Best thing I read this week:

 

Most interesting thing I read this week:

 


 

11/15/15

 

11/16/15

 

11/17/15

 

11/18/15

 

11/19/15

 

11/20/15

 

11/21/15

 

11/22/15

 

Reading search tools

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My little sister-in-law wanted a place she could search for plotlines and concepts from old short stories she read in school. I remembered that there was a forum once where you could ask someone about books or stories you vaguely remember but can’t recall the title. After a little Google-fu, I found a similar website that I shared with her. Still searching for the other one though; I’ll report back if I find it.

The site I found is called “Stump the Bookseller” by Ohio-based Loganberry Books (which I will definitely be visiting if I ever have occasion to be in Ohio). “Stump the Bookseller” attempts to, and I quote, “reconnect people to the books they love but can’t quite remember”. If you want to see the unsolved mysteries, click here and if you want to see the solved ones, click here.

World Cat, which is basically the online catalog of many participating libraries across the world, has a pretty great keyword search and can really help narrow down those nebulous plotlines and concepts. Or give you more great reading material.

If you’re looking for a book that was published before 1980, the site Old Children’s Books might have what you’re looking for. They aren’t updating the database anymore apparently, so it’s a small niche, but worth a look.

And of course, no list of books would be complete without a Good Reads mention. Good Reads is another go-to site for finding out books and stories, although their keyword search is a bit lacking in my opinion. If you’re a Good Reads user, be sure to friend me.


 

I wrote this in an effort to make my keystrokes count, a not-so-silly-but-sounds-kinda-silly idea I got from Jon Udell. Basically, you have a finite number of keystrokes, why waste them writing a response to a single person when you can make a blog post and serve dozens or more? It makes sense. And I’m doing it. =P