Show HN: My New Year's project, ICanHasNoise - Noisy backgrounds with just a URL

As a web developer and designer I've always found it annoying that whenever I want to add noise to an element background on a website, in the absence of any CSS3 support for noise, I have to boot up Photoshop, create a new image, fill it with the desired color, and apply the noise filter, and I have to go through this process again and again every time I want to tweak the background, wasting precious development time on such a mundane task.

So this New Year's Eve, I set out to solve this problem and this is the result, ICanHasNoise, a web service that lets you generate background images with noise with just a URL. For example, the URL http://icanhasnoise.com/123456/200x200/4 would generate a noisy background with color #123456 (gradient backgrounds are also supported), size 200x200 pixels, and with a 'noisiness' value of 4. This URL can then be slotted into to a CSS background-image rule and voilà, your element is noisily backgrounded without the involvement of any sort of image editor, and if you want to tweak the background, all you have now to do is change the URL.

I built this website to scratch my own itch and I hope that others will find the site useful too. Thanks for even bothering to take a look and as always, feedback is very much appreciated!

This looks super useful, but I would be afraid to rely on it in a production environment because it adds another external dependency.

Not sure if you are thinking of open sourcing this, but if you did it would be great. I could see this packaged as a gem, so people could easily add this to their own stack. And if the gem also implemented some kind of caching scheme, so images would only be generated once, it would be even awesomer.