March 17th, 2010

CSS3Generator: A Side Project Gone Wild

Lately I’ve been using more CSS3 in my projects. Mostly basic stuff like border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow, etc. I got sick of typing the duplicate code needed to get these to work cross-browser (I’m looking directly at you border-radius).

So last week I had a crazy idea to create a simple tool that would create some cross-browser CSS3 code based on whatever values you wanted. I spent about 10 minutes gathering the CSS properties that I used the most and threw a few random ones in for good measure. Then I spent about 10 more minutes sketching out the UI for it and deciding what my feature set was going to be. I sat down to write the code Friday night and Saturday morning until I got to a stopping point where it had the basic functionality I wanted.

You chose something from the drop-down, an area showed up for you to enter your values along with a box where you could get your auto-generated code. Simple & useful. I called it the CSS3Generator.

Then I decided it might be a good idea to actually buy the domain name so I had a place to put this on the internets. Novel idea right. I threw it up there, sent out a Tweet basically saying it wasn’t ready for prime time, but I was giving my followers a sneak peek.

This is where it gets crazy. I woke up Monday and was sifting through my RSS feeds when I came across this post from Ajaxian about Paul Irish’s very cool CSS3Please tool. I decided to leave a comment with a link to my own CSS3 Generator and didn’t think anything more of it.

A week went by with little traffic and then something happened. All of the sudden I was getting 100′s of visitors at a time. My Twitter stream went nuts. It was written up by several large web design blogs and was Tweeted by Smashing Magazine and Ryan Carson. I still don’t know exactly what set it off, but that’s the beauty of the internet.

I hurried up and finished the Live Preview feature of the site, which consequently broke the site in Safari on the Mac, but I thought it was an important enough feature to push it live anyway.

It’s still pretty amazing to me that a simple tool I created over the course of a few days has been so useful to so many people. I’m just glad I decided to throw Woopra on there (something I forgot to do when I initially launched it) so I could sit here and watch the chaos unfold. It’s crazy to see how connected and viral the internet is. Beautiful chaos I suppose.

CSS3 Generator