Things in the ocean: squid.pl

Both squid and pearls are found in the ocean right? OK, OK, so the title is a stretch...Anyway! I'm bored at work today and I threw some perl at a squid, this is what I got...

First off, squid fingers is a cool site with lots of nice backgrounds you can use on your site. As long as you give the designer props. Well the site is nice and all, but I couldn't get a good feel for what the patterns actually looked like so I decided to grab them myself.

Update: [2008 - 05 - 28]
I've re-written this script. The most recent version can always be found here: squidfingers.html

Here is what I came up with:

use LWP::Simple 'getstore';

for (1..126){
getstore('http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/patterns/img_'.$_.'.gif',$_.'.gif');
print qq~
<table background="$_.gif" height="400" width="100%">
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="middle"><h1>$_</h1></td>
</tr>
</table>~
}

usage: squid.pl > squid.html

You basically just call the file from the command line redirecting it's output to an HTML file. All of the files (at least to 126) will be saved locally to your machine and squid.html will have a nice preview of all of the tiled backgrounds.

Don't have perl? get it!

Windows: Active State
*nix: perl.org