I’ve been waking up around 4 every morning, which I’m grateful for because 4-8am is the only time I really have for coding on my own projects. The lack of sleep is getting to me, but I’ve been productive. I’m currently working on a new Lorem Ipsum generator in Ruby that will function as a library, a CLI, and the back end for md-lipsum. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but it’s coming along.
But this morning I got distracted by trying to create better off-white backgrounds for web pages. I know it’s a simple task with any color picker, but I have trouble getting it fine-tuned enough with sliders, and guessing different hex codes frustrates me. So I made a little thing for fine-tuning off-white and off-black background colors.
It’s just a hue, saturation, lightness slider, but instead of the lightness going from 0–100, it only goes from 90–100, offering granular control even for clumsy users, and then updates the entire background with the selected hue/tint so you can see how it will look on a page. The “Off Black” version of it changes the lightness slider to 0–40, offering a little more range for those dark grays.
All put together, it’s just called “Off.” It’s for me, but I made it available here just in case somebody else might have a use for it. I amused myself with a little CSS and vanilla JS to make the slider backgrounds work, so at least take a look at it and enjoy my latest stupid creation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://brettterpstra.com/2025/04/15/off-white-i-made-a-stupid-thing-this-morning