CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXVIII

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I was interviewed by Justin Crawford on the Mozilla Hacks blog about cross browser compatibility.

What motivates you to make the extra effort to build a cross-browser compatible site?

Money. People pay for websites that work for them. Here’s a little example: Just last week we were working on some drag-and-drop functionality in a new part of CodePen. Worked great in Chrome, didn’t work in either Firefox or Safari. Tim Holman, one of our front-end devs, had to spend a good part of a day implementing different fixes for both. Good thing we did that before launch, otherwise we surely would have turned some potential customers off.

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Everybody at CodePen is chugging away at big new features. Those aren’t ready to share yet. We knew it would take awhile, so we take little breaks to release small features. Things like Autocomplete in the Pen Editor, Image Uploading from the Post Editor, Checking for unused classes, and a few other small releases like that, all documented on The CodePen Blog.


Speaking of The CodePen Blog, it recently had a minor facelift. The homepage for the Podcast, CodePen Radio, looks the most different. We’re over 100 episodes now. For #100, we talked about the biggest Pens in the history of CodePen. Since then we’ve kicked off a 10-part mini-series talking with other businesses that some kind of similarity with CodePen, so we can extract valuable business information from them live on the radio ;).


Remember how I wrote a book? I talked all about it over on ShopTalk Show, then the next week, we talked with a bunch of other recent tech book authors in a panel all about book writing.

Other than that, ShopTalk has mostly just been Dave and I chatting in non-live mostly Q&A episodes. We’ve been loving that. It keeps the show more focuses and easier to do. I’m sure we’ll have other guests and potentially do a live show here and there, but for the immediate foreseeable future we plan to do mostly rapidfire episodes.


I’ve had the good fortune of being on some other folks podcasts as well:

  • M. David Green and Tim Evko had me as a guest on Versioning Show. We talked about things like trying not to feel useless taking a three month break from JavaScript, reaching for comfortable tools, and some of the pain you feel when you do reach for new and uncomfortable tools.
  • Christopher Schmitt had me on Non Breaking Space Show. We talked a bit about the book some esoteric SVG features. Or perhaps esoteric for now, but the fact that SVG can do some amazing stuff that people are re-discovering all the time can easily become the hot-new-thing.

There is a somewhat recent change here on CSS-Tricks where we “flattened” the forums. When you visited the forums before, you were greeted with five different categories and had to drill down into them to see what people were talking about most recently. Those categories still exist, but now the homepage of the forums is recent posts in all the categories. I hope exposing the conversations more quickly encourages more people to post new threads and participate in the ones that are there.


I have a few conferences coming up this October:

And a few lining up in Europe next year! As ever, I’m trying to keep it light, but go to enough of them where I don’t feed sad and start to miss them.