CSS-Tricks Chronicle XIX

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Today I hop on a plane to Norway for the Trondheim Developer Conference. First time there. Can’t wait. The conference isn’t until Monday, but I suck at traveling to Europe. I’m a big baby about jet lag, so I like lots of extra time to acclimate.


I was on Craig McKeachie’s Front-End Developer Podcast in the episode How to use custom fonts and @font-face.

I also got to be on Real Thread’s Local Masters podcast.


Things are going well at CodePen. We just recently hit 2,000,000 Pens created. We’ve been doing a bunch of maintenance work, a lot of it is kinda unsexy behind the scenes stuff, but I appreciate work like that more and more the longer we’re around.

One of the more public-facing features I worked on was converting the layout of the editors to use flexbox throughout. That made it easier to offer resizeable editors, a hotly requested featured since we launched.

We’ve been continuing our podcast series CodePen Radio with recent episodes including Responsibility and Churn.

One cool thing that I’m sure some of you can make us of: we’re giving away 2 weeks of PRO for free. Just click a button to activate yours.

So much more to come!


At the end of August I was back at Hilton Head Health trying to keep healthy lifestyle stuff in check. I left right on September 1st and spent that entire month eating vegan. It wasn’t life changing, but I enjoyed it, and hit my all time low weight. Sadly I’ve come back up a little, so I need to watch it.


Dave and I are still enjoying the heck out of doing ShopTalk. We’ll have episodes every week until around Christmas where we’ll probably take a few weeks off.

Don’t miss Web Standards Southern Gentlemen in the last RAPIDFIRE.


Since I last chronicled, I was at BlendConf which was a huge and wonderful conference. I met a bunch of folks there that I’ve been wanting to meet. I was vegan at the time and we scouted out the restaurant Bean to eat at, which I loved so much we went back twice. I had also just set up a turntable at home my friend gave me, and so went record shopping at Lunchbox which was pretty sweet. I love the idea of hitting up local record stores in cities I visit.

I also was at An Event Apart Austin, which was super good even as compared to other AEA’s, which are always good. I feel like I’m always treated very well as a speaker at conferences, but I extra appreciate the AEA organizer clan and how welcome they make me feel. Shout Jeffrey, Marcy, Toby, Steven and all! Some new very important things clicked for me listening to Mat Marquis and talking with Jason Grigsby about responsive images. Particularly this mostly-use-srcset business.

At BlendConf I met Nicole (and Max) Fenton and at AEA Austin I met Kate Kiefer Lee – the authors of Nicely Said. I look up to both of them tremendously for being so damn good at writing about writing.


A few weeks ago I was down in Key West (another first!) for a wedding. The whole Team CodePen was there, because it was our friend Ryan’s wedding. We all worked together back in the Wufoo days and I love it that we’re all still friends. I went pretty Florida Man.


I spent some time cleaning up the email that gets sent out around here. If you don’t get it yet, sign up here. It’s just all the blog posts that get published here but in a nice clean format right in your inbox.


Just plugging away here on CSS-Tricks as well.

Behind the scenes, I’m about to cut over to a larger, dedicated database server which I hope will increase the server side speed around here which has been a might slow.

If you’re a member of the forums, there are some new settings as part of your profile for when you wish to be emailed regarding @name notifications.

We tried a little chat widget in the forums area to see if people enjoyed realtime chat, but it just wasn’t a good fit.

You might notice some new Wufoo ads on the site. They renewed their sponsorship here, which is awesome because obviously I’m a big fan. They are tinkering with some new design over there, so I got a sneak peak at some of that and I designed these new ads in that direction.

You may have also noticed I’m doing sponsored posts here and there on the site. I’m marking them as clearly as I can so you know what is sponsored and what isn’t. If you’re interested in that, check out Syndicate Ads.

As always I have ten million ideas for things to write about so I’ll just keep on writing if you keep on reading.