Turn this

into this

You can use ImageMagick to make blurry images.

To install with Homebrew on OS X.

brew install imagemagick

After installing you can run from the command line

  convert yourimage.png -channel RGBA -blur 0x8 your-blurred-image.png

You can run this from your Ruby scripts with the back ticks.

`convert path/to/original-image.jpg -channel RGBA -blur 0x5 path/to/blurry-image.jpg`

Change the value for the "-blur 0x8" argument to increase/decrease they blur. For instance, "-blur 0x1" would be a lot less blurry.