CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXII

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

We put up a proper Team page. CSS-Tricks isn’t just me, but a whole team of part-time staff that keep this ship sailing. That includes writers. We’ve always had guest posts, but now, for the first time, you’ll be seeing articles not written by me that also aren’t “guest” posts, because they work here! Example. Notice it doesn’t have an introduction written by me like a guest post would. We’ll get proper author archives up soon.


Sponsored posts will also be slightly different soon. I’m going to put in a little audio clip for them, like this:

As I recently talked about, I like advertising when it’s done well. My idea with these audio clips is that it’s my chance to be super honest about sponsorships. With audio clips, I can explain the endorsement in my own words. And if I can’t do that, or the sponsor doesn’t like what I say, the deal is off.


The other week, Naysan Naraqi and Josh Janssen from Envato came to my house in Milwaukee and shot a video of me. Here’s their post on it. I think it turned out super well.

They have a whole YouTube channel of them, including recent ones from Cameron Moll and Dan Cederholm.


This season of ShopTalk has been going strong. We’ve had back-to-back guests each week for a bunch of months now. That will continue one more week, and then it’s starting to be conference season. We’ll still have an episode every week, but guest shows will be interspersed by RAPIDFIRE episodes and other specials. We have some really fun stuff lined up. Show concepts we’ve never done before.

We integrated our own chat room onto the site for when we’re live. We’re also working on updating our intro theme music, just to spice stuff up a bit.


Speaking of conference season, first up for me is heading down to ConvergeSE – one of my favorite conferences of the year. I’m leaving tomorrow morning and getting there way early. Partly because I like to think of ConvergeSE as the new SXSW. It’s a many-day conference a cool southern town known for BBQ, good music, and being hot. The conference takes place in a cool downtown area dispersed between many buildings, so there is lots of outside foot traffic. It just a good vibe.

I’m heading to Columbia tomorrow to meetup with the rest of Team CodePen so we can hang out a bit. Then we’re throwing a party with Sparkbox on Tuesday to kick things off!


From Columbia I head straight up to New York City for a week to hang out there and attend another CodePen Meetup. That one is full-up sadly, but there is a waiting list.


After that I’m home for just a few days before I’m taking a trip with my family to Branson, Missouri. Just some good ol’ fashioned family fun. We rented an AirBnB and are just gonna see some music shows and go to some water parks and whatnot.


Then the conferences continue! I’ll be at An Event Apart Boston, then headed straight down to Front End Design Conference.


I’ve gotten to be a guest on a few brand new podcasts lately. SVG Immersions with Rob Levin just launched, and I’m on episodes 4 and 5.

I was also on the not-yet-launched Spirit of the Midwest podcast, so stay tuned for that.


One thing I just want to cover briefly, as I’ll be doing a bigger post on it soon, is YWebCA. YWCA is a national organization with the slogan “eliminating racism – empowering women”. Madison has a branch and a building there. The YWeb Career Academy (YWebCA) uses space in that building to have the class.

YWeb Career Academy (YWebCA) trains women and people of color, underrepresented in technology, to attain family-sustaining jobs while meeting a labor market gap. We provide instruction in front-end web development skills—including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Node.js, user experience design and project management—to 20–25 students (per session) through 400 hours of intensive instruction.

I visited the other week to give a guest talk, and I’ve been going back as often as I can since then to help out. It’s amazing. Everybody involved is kicking ass, providing spot-on useful, modern tech training to an engaged group of students. Like I said, I’ll post more on it soon.