Lately, I've been sliding back into the habit of working late at night (or, at least, certainly intending to.) However, a break between leaving work and the late night makes it somwhat difficult to get back into the swing of things.

I find it often helps to build a simple, useless, weird project before getting started to help get my mind in the right place. Some of my most recent projects are:

watwatwat

It's a weird bag of clever and overengineered CSS that gives you something that vaguely resembles what you might remember working on an old, gaussed CRT looked like. You can type wat over and over. It also served to teach me about some of the weirder corners of the latest CSS specs, like webkit-mask-image - I'm particularly proud of how I got the corners, and only the corners, to blur on the "screen". (And using a radial gradient at that.)

I also used that as inspiration for my latest blog design. Not sure if it'll stick or not, but here's trying. The color scheme is based on Andrea Leopardi's Gotham and I implemented it while listening to a lot of Com Truise.

CSS*WORDS

I took a listing from /usr/share/dict/words, then grepped it to find what words had [0-9a-f] along with some letters I could translate (l = 1, z = 2, etc.) I then took that and built a big page of all the colors. It made me realize how long it's been since I actually did manual DOM manipulation without fifteen layers of libraries abstracting things away. I'm, manually creatig document fragments and stuff. it's crazy. At one point I even wrote my own new XMLHttpRequest() before I moved the colors array into the same file for performance.

Anyway, I hope someone gets a chuckle, or at least exhales sharply out of their nostrils. It was fun. Now, back to work.