Building Kentucky Ipsum: A Lorem Ipsum Generator for the Big Blue Nation

Aug 29, 2026

Side Project

Web Development Astro React Tailwind CSS Higher Ed

Let’s be honest: standard lorem ipsum has had a good run, but Cicero probably never got stuck in Nicholasville Road gameday traffic or craved a 2:00 AM Super Swiss Ho Burger from Tolly-Ho (RIP Ho 🕊️).

When you’re wireframing layouts and building prototypes, staring at walls of “dolor sit amet consectetur” gets a little dry. To add some much-needed Bluegrass personality to my design mockups, I decided to build Kentucky Ipsum — a fun, theme-driven dummy text generator for the Big Blue Nation and anyone who loves Central Kentucky.

What’s in the Sauce?

Instead of just spitting out random Latin, Kentucky Ipsum blends classical placeholder dummy text with local culture, campus lore, and beloved Kentucky staples:

Campus Chants & Legends: “Go Big Blue!”, “Cats by 90!”, “C-A-T-S! Cats! Cats! Cats!”, Rupp Arena, Kroger Field, and Willy T.
Local Eats & Sips: Ale-8, Beer cheese, Hot Brown, Spalding’s donuts, Mingua beef jerky, and local craft brews like Country Boy and Mirror Twin.
Central Kentucky Landmarks: Keeneland, Red River Gorge, Miguel’s Pizza, The Arboretum, and the inescapable New Circle Road loop.
The “More Gatton” Slider: Because you can never have enough Gatton. Crank the intensity slider up to 100% and watch the entire app surrender to a full Gatton Ipsum takeover.

How It’s Built

Behind the silliness, I wanted to use this side project to play around with modern web tooling:

Astro v7 + React 19: Astro handles the lightning-fast static shell, while a React island (client:load) powers all the live slider interactions, instant text regeneration, and clipboard copying.
Smart Sentence & Paragraph Engine: Rather than just smashing random words together, the generator uses a sentence-structure engine with realistic lengths, proper capitalization, natural punctuation, and punchy celebratory chants sprinkled in.
Tailwind CSS v4 + daisyUI v5: Styled with our favorite signature blue (#0033a1), sleek mockup window containers, live stats (paragraphs, sentences, words, and characters), and an optional toggle to wrap text in <p> HTML tags for quick copy-pasting into code.

If you need some fresh placeholder text for your next project (or just want to generate 10 paragraphs of pure Gatton), take it for a spin at kentucky-ipsum.uk!