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DevJuice: placekitten and other handy placeholder sites

Erica Sadun
Senior Writer
Updated ·1 min read
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What do you give to the dev who has everything? How about placeholder kittens, compete with their own API? placekitten.com provides on-demand placeholder art at the resolution you specify.

For example, you could ask for a 625x225 image by submitting a request to:

http://placekitten.com/625/225

If kittens aren't your thing (don't tell Steve), you can check out placedog.com instead. The API is the same, but with a canine slant. For ursine lovers, there's also placebear.com.

Other sites with less kawaii include Placehold.it, Lorem Pixum, and FlickrHoldr.com. For a while, apparently, there was also a disturbing "sheenholders" site, but it appears to have gone away.

One of the more flexible APIs comes from dummyimage.com, which allows you to specify background color, foreground color, and text to generate a string-based image, e.g.

http://dummyimage.com/300x400/000/fff&text=HELLO

Speaking of placeholder content, I'm a big user of Lipsum.com, a lorem ipsum-style text generator. A number of humorous spoof sites have recently launched including Bacon Ipsum, Cupcake Ipsum, Samuel L. Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum, Swearum Ipsum (NSFW), Trollem Ipsum (NSF TUAW readers), and Bogan Ipsum (NSFW).

For HTML content (perfect for developing web views) there's Fillerama and HTML Ipsum. These sites provide HTML-formated filler elements. The former one lets you choose from various geek sources (like Futurama, Dr. Who, and Dexter). The latter offers basic HTML elements including lists, tables, and forms.