Jaequery's Blog

bitcss - a centralized CSS repository powered by github

A single repository for CSS

When developing sites, I constantly feel the need to have the ability to quickly browse and choose through hundreds of styles. Like a centralized repository, just for css. Not even just to use them, but even just to serve me as an inspiration.

There are seemingly many single centralized repositories out there, like jquery plugins for js, gems for ruby, and apt for ubuntu, etc. But nothing like it for css.

Gotta admit that Twitter bootstrap is cool

Currently, CSS are a pain to re-use but when there is a way (like how twitter bootstrap did), it is simply an enjoyable experience to work off of. But currently they are the only ones that exists of that nature and I don’t think we will see any more of these anytime soon.

The Github strategy

So I’m creating a centralized github repository, where anyone can crowd-source their CSS and html assets.

Anyone can then easily browse through and choose different types of h1, h2, h3, top menus, boxes, containers, and etc … And everyone is encouraged to to create variations (big or small) to support even more varieties and styles back to the community.

For anyone that is familiar to Remy’s mit-license repo (github.com/remy/…) it’ll be like that and it works surprisingly well. There can be some automation done to be better but I don’t think it’s that much of an issue.

Simple to use and simple to contribute

For those not familiar, it works like this:

1) fork the bitcss repo
2) add your own folder (like /yourusername/my_bootstrap) with your own copy of the assets (html/images/css) to the repo
3) send a push notification when you want to contribute back

For the benefit of the web development community

Considering the small effort it takes to contribute, the amount of benefit the css community as a whole will get is worth it.

Like an open-source CSS community

Basically for starters, small contributions of simple stylable elements like modal box, navigations, forms, and alerts/confirm would be very helpful.

Next step is to come up with a front-end interface that lets you browse through these css snippets, and possibly even make it into a SaaS to deliver custom CSS on the fly.

Need developers!

I haven’t really done anything yet up to this point. I’m just really using this post to validate an idea and see if there is enough people interested in it. Even the github, I need to sitdown and think about the best file structures to support this. If you are interested in being a part of this project or want to just keep tabs on the status of the project, follow me at @jaequery. 

Update

I have posted a follow up to this post!