CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXII

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Hey y’all! Time for a quick Chronicle post where I get to touch on and link up some of the happenings around the site that I haven’t gotten to elsewhere.


Technologically around here, there have been a few small-but-interesting changes.

Site search is and has been powered by Algolia the last few months. I started up writing some thoughts about that here, and it got long enough I figured I’d crack it off into it’s own blog post, so look forward to that soon.

Another service I’ve started making use of is Cloudinary. Cloudinary is an image CDN, so it’s serving most of the image assets here now, and we’re squeezing as much performance out of that as we possibly can. Similar to Algolia, it has a WordPress plugin that does a lot of the heavy lifting. We’re still working out some kinks as well. If you’re interested in how that all goes down, Eric Portis and I did a screencast about it not too long ago.


We hit that big 10-year milestone not too long ago. It feels both like heck yes and like just another year, in the sense that trucking right along is what we do best.

We still have plenty of nerdy shirts (free shipping) I printed up to sorta celebrate that anniversary, but still be generic and fun.


As I type, I’m sitting in New Orleans after CSS Dev Conf just wrapped up. Well, a day after that, because after such an amazing and immersive event, and a full day workshop where I talk all day long, I needed to fall into what my wife calls “an introvert hole” for an entire day of recovery.

From here, I fly to Barcelona for Smashing Conf which is October 17-18.

The last two conferences for me this year will be An Event Apart San Francisco in late October and Denver in mid-December.

Next year will be much lighter on conference travel. Between having a daughter on the way, wanting more time at home, and desiring a break, I won’t be on the circuit too much next year. Definitely a few though, and I do have at least one big fun surprise to talk about soon.


CodePen has been hard at work, as ever. Sometimes our releases are new public features, like the new Dashboard. Sometimes the work is mostly internal. For example, we undertook a major rewriting of our payment system so that we could be much more flexible in how we structure plans and what payment providers we could use. For example, we now use Braintree in addition to Stripe, so that we could make PayPal a first-class checkout citizen like many users expect.

It’s the same story as I write. We’re working on big projects some of which users will see and directly be able to use, and some of which are infrastructural that make CodePen better from the other side.

Did you know the CSS-Tricks Job Board is powered by the CodePen Job Board? Post in one place, it goes to both. Plus, if you just wanna try it out and see if it’s effective for your company, it’s free.


We don’t really have official “seasons” on ShopTalk, but sometimes we think of it that way. As this year approaches a close, we know we’ll be taking at least a few weeks off, making somewhat of a seasonal break.

Our format somewhat slowly morphs over time, but we still often have guests and still answer questions, the heart of ShopTalk Show. Our loose plan moving forward is to be even more flexible with the format, with more experimental shows and unusual guests. After all, the show is on such a niche topic anyway (in the grand scheme of things) that we don’t plan to change, we might as well have the flexibility to do interesting things that still circle around, educate, and entertain around web design and development.


I’ve gotten to be a guest on some podcasts recently!

I also got to do a written interview with Steve Domino for Nanobox, The Art of Development. Plus, Sparkbox wrote up a recap of my recent workshop there, Maker Series Recap: Chris Coyier.


Personally, I’ve completed my move out to Bend, Oregon! I’m loving Bend so far and look forward to calling it home for many years to come. For the first time ever, I have my own office. Well, it’s a shared room in a shared office, but we all went in on it together and it’s ours. We’re moved in and decking it out over the coming months and it’s been fun and feels good.