John PolacekChicago Web Developer

Responsive Web Design is pretty darn cool, but it is hard sometimes for people to wrap their heads around it. Whether you are trying to share a cool responsive website or do a creative review, telling people to change their browser window size just doesn’t cut it. With that in mind, a few weeks ago I created, open sourced and released Responsivator!

There are plenty of viewport testing tools out there (apparently even including one named Responsinator) but none that worked quite the way I wanted

First, I didn’t want their to be ads. Even better, I wanted a way to show these websites with no clutter at all. With Responsivator!, you can do that. Just add the hide header option to the end of the url, like this: http://johnpolacek.github.com/Responsivator/?site=http://css-tricks.com&header=hide

Also, it is possible to customize the sizes and frame labels that get displayed. For example, if you only want to show the phone sizes of a website, you can do this: http://johnpolacek.github.com/Responsivator/?site=http://css-tricks.com&sizes=320×480:Phone%20(portrait),480×320:Phone%20(landscape).

As one of the first projects released on my developer group’s Github account, I’m very please to see that based on the traffic stats, it is a huge success. After the initial burst of popularity due to getting to the front page of Hacker News and a nice article on Webmonkey, it continues to get about 500-1,000 page views a day. You can expect to see a lot more cool projects come out from us in the upcoming year.