CSS-Tricks Chronicle XVIII

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

Lots of stuff happening lately and far too long since I’ve done a Chronicle! Where I’ve been, where I’m going, things I’ve done, things I’m doing, etc.


I’m fresh back from a week trip to Iceland. It was the first for-fun-only trip I’ve taken since I went to Scotland last year. It was amazing.

I did a photo dump over on Flickr, but I’m planning on creating a better page for it somewhere, mixing choice photos with words. Exposure seems like the way to go, but I’m tempted to build my own thing too.


I’m off to Bend, Oregon later this week. To hang out and work with Team CodePen. We like to get together in the same place about once a quarter. We’re gonna do some mountain biking, future-talkin’, pool-sittin’, and working.

It doubles up nicely with the (sad trombone) last-ever Front End Design Conference. It’s a special conference for me because it was the first I ever spoke at. If you live anywhere near Portland, Oregon, you should come. Dan and Cherrie are making it a pay-whatever-you-can model, which is pretty dang cool.


I got to go to Düsseldorf, Germany a few month ago for Beyond Tellerrand this year and they put up my talk on SVG. I’m constantly updating this talk and will be giving it for the rest of this year. I think SVG is a damn important part of web design front end development these days.

Speaking of talks of mine that are now available online, An Event Apart published a talk I did in Austin last year about preprocessing.


Here’s the full list of things I’ll be speaking at for the rest of the year:


I got to be on Brian Krogsgard’s postcast Post Status.


CodePen has been chugging along great. It’s my full time focus. After we launched our big new blogging feature, we’ve been kinda heads-down doing lots of maintenance and cleanup work. Things like upgrading servers and software, closing bugs, refactoring code, increasing security, honing performance, and things like that.

We’re just now starting to release little features again, like adding Angular, making it easier to build Collections, accepting PayPal, allowing new sorting methods, among other things. There is a lot more to come. We have so many ideas it’s as absurd as it is exciting. We’re deep into a good three new killer things.

We’ve also record 20 episodes now (!) of CodePen Radio.


Over in ShopTalk land things are going well too. Show after show, week after week, just how we like it. We never celebrated episode #100, deciding to opt for an episode #123 celebration instead. For that, we dug up a super old episode from 2004!

Dave and I want to make sure we keep ShopTalk worth listening to for y’all, and that means listening to you about what you like and don’t like. So: Survey Time!. If you complete the survey, you’ll be entered to win one of two tickets to the Front End Summit. We’ll pick the winners August 18.


For the first time I’m doing something responsible with my personal business stuff and I made an LLC that I called “Midwest Coast Studios LLC”. I have special bank accounts and credit cards and accounting software and everything. Fannnnccccyyyy. I used LegalZoom to set it up and I can recommend that since it was way fast and easy.