Julia Evans

Day 3: an infinitely tall fridge

Hello! Here are some notes from Day 3 at the Recurse Center.

This post is an extremely short one from the toy refrigerator poetry forum website I’m working on. I needed to come up with a design for it, and finally today I came up with an idea: just put everything on an image of a fridge.

I found a stock image of a fridge, but I ran into a problem immediately, which was that the entire website could not fit on said fridge image.

So I figured how to make a fridge that was as tall as I wanted it to be. (not technically “infinite”, but “a fridge that is as big as required” didn’t have quite the same ring).

here’s the infinite fridge

Here’s a CodePen with the HTML/CSS required to make an infinite fridge. It’s relatively simple and I’m very pleased about this. It basically has 3 images: one for the top of the fridge, a 1px line that can be repeated as much as required, and then the bottom.

See the Pen infinite refrigerator by Julia Evans (Julia Evans) on CodePen.

that’s all!

I started writing an explanation of how exactly this infinite fridge works, but I ran out of time so maybe another day :). (the main trick is that padding-bottom is a percentage of the parent element’s width, not its height, so you can use it to create a box with a fixed aspect ratio)

Day 2: Rails associations & dragging divs around How do you write simple explanations without sounding condescending?