CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXI

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As I write I’m half way through my month-long stay at Hilton Head Health. I like coming here to keep my weight in check. I hope to break some personal records while I’m here this time. It’s also been a good way to escape some of the Wisconsin winter. It has been mild up until I left, but it sounds like February has been pretty rough so far.


We’ve brought on a couple of part-time writers here on CSS-Tricks to help me keep all these articles around here up-to-date and produce new stuff as well. They’ve already been hard at work!

Please welcome Marie Mosley and Robin Rendle!


I’ve been a guest on three different podcasts recently. I was on Dradcast with Brad Williams and Dre Armeda. Then The Web Platform Podcast with Rachel Nabors, Erik Isaksen, Christian Smith, and Danny Blue. Then Developer Tea with Jonathan Cutrell.

We talked about different things on all of them, but generally about all the stuff I love: CodePen, CSS, work, all that good stuff.


Speaking of podcasts, ShopTalk is going strong in 2015. New website and everything. We have been booked solid with great guests and will continue to be for quite a while. It’s crazy to think we’ll dang near hit 200 episodes this year. I’m so grateful to be able to talk with so many smart people all the time, and then get to share it.

We can’t quite afford to get every single episode transcribed, but we pick some here and there to have done. Most recently Tom Dale and Wren Lanier.


Shout out to RealThread for always doing a great job with the T-Shirts we print around here. It’s cool to see some of the shirts be used around their site for demonstrating stuff. Like this and this (taken from when we were testing the last shirt with a bunch of different options to find the best combo).

We’ll get a store back open here soon.


Perhaps you’ve seen the job board around here? It’s all about front end design and development jobs. You know, the kind of stuff we work about endless here on CSS-Tricks. It’s actually powered by the CodePen job board, and it triples as the ShopTalk job board as well.

If you’re looking to hire, your post goes a long way between all three sites. If you’re looking for work, we have some pretty fantastic jobs on there. Dream job stuff. In a parallel universe somewhere I’m dropping everything to apply for them.


And speaking of CodePen, there is always a lot going on there. And the end of last year, the three of us gave ourselves “three wishes”. Three things we really want to see get done at CodePen. So nine wishes total, and we’re going to chug through those this year before moving onto more development work. I always say this, but we have easily years worth of ideas to build.

One recent thing I’ve been working on is making sure everything that displays code on CodePen does it the exact same way. It uses the same syntax highlighting engine, and honors the logged in users choice of font, theme, etc. We figure if you’ve specifically chosen those things, you’ll want to see code that way everywhere. The first port-over was the blogs.

We’ve also rolled out the most requested feature ever: proper settings for your choice of tabs or spaces, and how deep the indent.


I’ll be speaking at some conferences coming up. Not many this year, trying to chill that out, but some. The nearest upcoming ones are the RWD Summit (online) this March 10-12 then An Event Apart Boston this May 11-13.

I’ll also be down at ConvergeSE throwing a party with Sparkbox on April 14.