The Fourth Fourth

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

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Today is the best holiday of the year: CSS-Tricks birthday! And it’s extra special this time because it’s a Golden Birthday (turning four on the fourth). I’ve traditionally done a brief state of the union to mark the day, so I thought I’d keep it up.

On CSS-Tricks first birthday, I was living in Portland, Oregon (only for a few months at the time having moved from Madison, Wisconsin). One the second birthday, I was leaving Portland and moving to Chicago, Illinois. The third birthday I was still in Chicago but starting to plan my move to Tampa, Florida. Now on the fourth birthday I’m just about to move to Palo Alto, California as part of the Survey Monkey / Wufoo acquisition. While the scenery changes a lot for me, working on CSS-Tricks feels like home wherever I am.

Thing may be a little slow around here during my move and settling into California. Plus summer is always so life-busy. Traffic reflects that as well. I think the internet as a whole is just a bit slower in the summer.

Last year I was kinda bitching about FeedBurner’s unreliability, but noted that RSS subscribers were hovering about 50,000. Now we’re well above 70,000 so that’s pretty sweet. Growth is a powerful motivator. FeedBurner has been solid as well, and interestingly, still really the only serious player in the feed analytics market as far as I know. They have a Beta design that’s been in Beta for I feel like six months and I hope it never goes live because I really don’t like it. They should try a do-over and consult the team doing the rest of the Google makeover stuff lately (like the brand new Google Plus) because that stuff is fabulous.

The forums are doing fine and I always love to see people getting and giving help there, but they will probably remain a bit of a small niche community of CSS folks rather than a major driving force of the site. The majority of traffic to the site is to the blog articles. That’s great, because writing articles is the thing I love doing the most and plan to continue spending most of my time doing. The downloads area always sees a large amount of traffic and I gotta keep on myself to keep that area up to date both in adding new demos and making sure old stuff isn’t outdated garbage.

Screencasts have really slowed down as far as time in between new ones. They have long been one of the least-value-for-time-spent things I do for the site, but I still plan to keep doing them. Enough people seem to like them, I like doing them, and I think that medium is super useful in teaching. #100 is coming up soon and I hope to have some small surprise for it.

I have three or four ideas simmering on ways to expand the site that I’m excited about. It’s been a long time since there’s been a new section on this site. Snippets was the last thing. I’m not much for elaborate teasers, so let’s just leave it at that.

In other behind the scenes news, I now have another part time person (my friend, Sara Cope) to help maintain the site and do various CSS-Tricks related stuff. This helps free up my time to focus on creating stuff and writing which is how I prefer to spend the time I have for this site. One of her first projects was updating the entire catalog of old videos into a new format in our backend, which was a huge undertaking. It’s all done now, which has cool benefits like that iTunes page will have the complete catalog again, there is a quality sitemap for them, and everything is consistent as I work on a design refresh for the site.

Fun times ahead, thanks everyone for reading!