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Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

chriscoyier.net

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Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#51

Post by Turing_Machine »

ZachSaucier wrote: post #12
elaus wrote: post #8

I miss that page so much. Honestly I kind of forgot about the buyout for a while and didn't notice the sudden lack of well-written articles about cool new CSS stuff – but one day I realized that nothing relevant has been in my RSS feed for a while and it seems like this won't change in the near future :/

Chris now helps run the Frontend Masters blog (called Boost). It's got solid content (some from myself) on there! https://frontendmasters.com/blog/

Nice! I'd somehow missed the existence of this, even though I'm subscribed to Coyier's blog.

Subscribed now.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#52

Post by red_admiral »

notatoad wrote: post #50
red_admiral wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair though, CSS is one of the things where a great designer who can make things look sexy might be worth that $500 to learn from. After all, your site looking better can translate to a lot of extra user engagement and money.

Teaching css and teaching design aren’t the same thing though. And the beginner css courses are mostly not teaching design.

I'm sure you're right, but I wish the two were taught together more - the "how" (CSS syntax) and "why" (design principles) should really be approached together, with a bit of talking about accessibility thrown in.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#53

Post by nox101 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #11

I still visit the site a lot for the Flexbox guide. Hey, it's sad that it went down but if I were Chris, I would have sold it too probably. That's the way it is in the economy of the internets: maintaining a community resource that is above and beyond typical SEO junk is hard work and DEFINITELY does not pay what it should, considering it's real value to the community. (It probably would if large tech companies did n…

I do too but it's outdated. As a trivial example there's `place-content` which is not mentioned (it's in the comments). So, it's not the "Complete Guide to Flexbox" (I've learned the hard way not to name things so pretentiously)

Lots of stuff on the site is out of date. Some is just flat out wrong with comment closed. Maybe that stuff will get fixed if it's taken up again but many of these issues existed before it was sold.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#54

Post by chatmasta »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #11

I still visit the site a lot for the Flexbox guide. Hey, it's sad that it went down but if I were Chris, I would have sold it too probably. That's the way it is in the economy of the internets: maintaining a community resource that is above and beyond typical SEO junk is hard work and DEFINITELY does not pay what it should, considering it's real value to the community. (It probably would if large tech companies did n…

I still visit the site when a Google search sends me there, but otherwise I just read Chris' blog, since his posts were the only reason I ever went to css-tricks on a whim anyway.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#55

Post by apetresc »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #11

I still visit the site a lot for the Flexbox guide. Hey, it's sad that it went down but if I were Chris, I would have sold it too probably. That's the way it is in the economy of the internets: maintaining a community resource that is above and beyond typical SEO junk is hard work and DEFINITELY does not pay what it should, considering it's real value to the community. (It probably would if large tech companies did n…

> (It probably would if large tech companies did not exist.)

By what mechanism?

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#56

Post by zrn900 »

Well. I do use digitalocean and reading that they screwed up with CSS tricks did affect my perception of them. You screw Open Source/dev community only once. Then you spend decades trying to fix your reputation and fail at it. Just ask Microsoft.

Whatever they do, they should keep the site running and keep it on WP as its an endorsement of open source and a great demonstration of their platform in hosting the biggest website framework on the Internet. (~43% of all web sites and 30% of all ecommerce sites are WP at the moment).

Or they can improve their bottom line by shutting it down or by moving it to some other stack that has no relation with what people actually use in the wild and screw their reputation up forever.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#57

Post by krisroadruck »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #26
krisroadruck wrote: post #4

I basically called this the day the acquisition was announced: https://twitter.com/KrisRoadruck/status/1503738797527343105

What’s your point? I can’t imagine that you’re showing how many of these calls you miss.

As far as I am aware I haven't made any other calls at all. This one wasn't exactly hard to predict given their treatment of scotch.io

Both were marketing/seo plays and long term there was never any incentive for them to keep the brands independent and operating at full cost.

TL;DR if you want your publication to live on well after you sell it, sell it to a publisher business, don't sell it to a product/service business.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#58

Post by xk_id »

begueradj wrote: post #19

In the link related to Geoff being fired from CSS Tricks: >Anyone who knows me well knows that I never have one job, but many eggs in a number of baskets. That's one of the wisest approaches to life: having multiple sources of income so that in case you're laid off, it won't affect you that much -at least financially.

It should go far beyond money- the things that make you get up in the morning should be as many and as diverse as possible. Having enough stuff going on, even if you become poor, or sad, or lonely.

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#59

Post by unleashit »

datavirtue wrote: post #46

No way in hell I would waste dev time fabricating CSS these days. Tailwind + Copilot. Have fun AND release. Kudos to Chris for cashing out.

This is such an interesting attitude. I hope I don't inherit any of your projects. I have the opposite take... that the world needs him more than ever. Tailwind is the pump and dump of web development. I can definitely see the allure when it comes to hammering up the fastest possible prototypes with minimal knowledge required, but in reality it's 1 step forward and 10 steps back.

It's legacy is going to be more of bummer than a lot of folks realize I'm afraid. What are you going to do when the Product Manager comes in with the new design comps after you've hard coded all that html with the disparate output of ChatGPT and/or various pasted in snippets from libraries like Shadcn?

Re: Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

#60

Post by wentin »

This is not the first time digital ocean did something like this. And unlike some other commenter here saying they only did it because CSS tutorials don't give them ROI, extra information here is that they also did it with javascript tutorials, like scotch.io, so I am leaning towards to that DO just do poorly with their investment regardless. I wrote more about their track record in buying indie dev blog and then kill them in my newsletter last year when CSS-Tricks's editor got laid off: https://build.typogram.co/p/dont-sell-your-indie-business-to

I think Chris pointed out a very key fact: running site like css tricks or scotch.io takes a special mix of skill, organically the site grows big with one or two person with that right mix of skills, but once big corporate bought it and for whatever reason didn't retain that talent, they have to replace it with a team, which kills the ROI.

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