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DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

css-tricks.com

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Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#161

Post by snorgle2 »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #158
snorgle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalOcean’s strategy with evergreen technical content was to duplicate Linode’s strategy with evergreen technical content wholesale , down to individual articles. Linode Library, including a complete custom CMS and community engagement strategy to pay Linode users to help generate evergreen, was in place and driving conversions long before DigitalOcean was founded. They cribbed just about everything substantive fr…

I’m not debating anything you’ve argued (I don’t know enough to know one way or another, except I will say that as an end-user, I remember liking DO’s documentation more in 2011 than Linode’s, but that doesnr mean the content is wasn’t still largely copied), but didn’t Slicehost (RIP) innovate the whole docs/tutorials as a sales funnel thing? I’m sure DO took a lot of inspiration from Linode, but it always seemed lik…

100%. Good memory, too. Slicehost probably deserves credit as well. I’m not arguing for who deserves it. Arguing for who doesn’t. Slicehost’s approach to a number of things was better in a lot of ways and they did documentation a little differently, but you’re right, the funnel concept is the same (between all three).

I miss them too. They were respectful competitors and I know they were generally liked by competitors. There’s just a fine line between getting the idea for a funnel and copying its entire execution down to subscribing to RSS. I think there was mutual respect between both companies on that. With DO, not so much.

To be clear, it’s not Apple vs Google here, it’s the idea of DO coming out of the gate with that execution being a stroke of genius. They had (thanks for the reminder) multiple precedences and actively copied from at least one.

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#162

Post by hinkley »

helipad wrote: post #19

All frontend developers: keep the Flexbox article alive please.

As others have said in other threads, I don't think you have much to worry about.

DO seems to value quality over quantity for documentation. Documentation appears to be their 'doing well by doing good' strategy. What BackBlaze is to hard drive reviews, DO is to a subset of platform agnostic cloud technologies. I don't know what they do now, but at one point a couple years ago they were soliciting 'paid' articles, but rather than paying you directly they would make a donation to an organization on their list on your behalf.

If I were telling an intern where to look for technical knowledge on the internet, my advice would be something like this: start at their website (mostly for due diligence, since 4/5 times you won't find what you want there), Stack Overflow, Google, Digital Ocean, and then look for either books by the authors (if you're a bookish sort), or find conversations with the authors on the internet.

Though now Google is falling fast. I'm on the cusp of demoting it below DO. I feel that camel straining under the weight on its back. SEO is turning into Search Engine Sabotage lately.

If DO starts buying up knowledge bases that could flip for positive reasons instead of negative ones.

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#164

Post by saghm »

867-5309 wrote: post #146
jonny_eh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could even argue that "here's" is now an accepted conjugation of "here are".

that's almost as annoying as "have you got them?" - "I do" - "do what.. do have? do got??"

To be fair, I think "do you have them?" would be more common for a lot of English speakers ("have you got" sounds British to me as an American, but it's possible that this is just a regional American thing). I'm not sure I would either think fast enough to care enough to tailor my automated response to a question like that based on the exact phrasing of the query.

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#165

Post by swyx »

vohu43 wrote: post #159
skilled wrote: post #15

Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris. Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there. Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[…

Did the quality of the content on scotch.io change? Can we expect the same thing for CSS-tricks?

scotch's traffic has been in sharp decline since the acquisition https://www.similarweb.com/website/scotch.io/#overview

i'm not really sure what they bought to be honest

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#168

Post by radicalriddler »

jjcm wrote: post #133
tannhaeuser wrote: post #40

Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of t…

I'm actually pretty optimistic about this - DigitalOcean does great work around docs and tutorial type sites. Half of the time when I search for things like, "how to install nvm on Ubuntu 20.04" a digital ocean article comes up, and it's really well done.

The amount of times at my last company, as a frontend developer, who was being told to build ubuntu vm's for web servers, DO saved my life.

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#169

Post by jonny_eh »

anchpop wrote: post #151
DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're discussing grammer, when you say "literally", you mean figuratively?

Grammer conversations are the very pineapple of useless discourse, and I don't see why we don't nip them in the butt. Weather you say "literally" or "figuratively", both are equally understandable for all intensive purposes. So as far as I'm concerned these arguments serve no porpoise and we'd be better off if they faded into Bolivian.

I would loose any argument with you sir.

Re: DigitalOcean acquires CSS-tricks

#170

Post by the_common_man »

skilled wrote: post #15

Wow, pretty big sale! Big congrats to Chris. Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there. Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[…

Do you know the numbers? Is that what you meant by big sale?
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