CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVII

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

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Chronicle posts are opportunities for me to round-up things that I haven’t gotten a chance to post about yet, rounded up together. It’s stuff like podcasts I’ve had the good fortune of being on, conferences I’ve been at or are going to be at, happenings at ShopTalk and CodePen, and more.

My talk at JAMstack_conf

We recorded a live episode of ShopTalk Show as well:

A guest on The Product Business Podcast

Happenings at CodePen

As I write and publish this, we’re rolling out a really cool new UI feature. Wherever you’re browsing CodePen you see grids of items. For example, a 6-up grid of Pens. Click them and it takes you to the Pen Editor (there are some shortcuts, like clicking the views number takes you to Full Page View and clicking the comments number takes you to Details View). Now, there is a prominent action that will expand the Pen into a modal right on that page. This will allow you to play with the Pen, see it’s code, see the description, tags, comments… really everything related to that Pen, and without leaving the page you were on. It’s a faster, easier, and more fun way to browse around CodePen. If you’re not PRO, there are some ads as part of it, which helped justify it from a business perspective.

Other newer features include any-size Teams, user blocking, and private-by-default.

Oh! And way nicer Collections handling:

Part of life at CodePen is also all the things we do very consistently week after week, like publish our weekly newsletter The CodePen Spark, publish our podcast CodePen Radio, and produce weekly Challenges to give everyone a fresh prompt to build something from if you could use the nudge.

Upgrading to PRO is the best thing you can do to support me and these sites.

My talk at FITC’s Web Unleashed

My talk at Craft CMS’s dotall Conf

I was on a panel discussion there as well: The Future of Web Development Panel with Ryan Irelan, Andrew Welch, Matsuko Friedland, Marion Newlevant, and myself. Here’s that video:

Conferences

I don’t have any more conferences in 2019, but I’ll be at a handful of them in 2020 I’m sure. Obviously I’m pretty interested in anything that gets into front-end web development.

Remember we have a whole calendar site for upcoming front-end development-related conferences! Please submit any you happen to see missing.

The only ones I have booked firmly so far are Smashing Conf in April / San Francisco and June / Austin.

Happenings at ShopTalk

We don’t even really have “seasons” on ShopTalk Show. Instead, we’re just really consistent and put out a show every week. We’ll be skipping just one show over the holidays (that’s a little nuts, honestly, we should plan to take a longer break next year).

We’re edging extremely close to hitting episode #400. I think it’ll end up being in February. Considering we do about a show a week, that’s getting on eight years. Questions like: Are we played out? Are people finding us still? Are people afraid to jump in? Are people as engaged with the show this far in? – have been going through my mind. But anytime we mention stuff along those lines on the show, we hear from lots of people just starting to listen, having no trouble, and enjoying it. I think having a “brand” as established as we’ve done with ShopTalk Show is ultimately a good thing and worth keeping on largely as-is. We might not be as hot’n’fresh as some new names in podcasting, but even I find our show consistently interesting.

Some of our top-downloaded shows in the last few months:

Ducktapes

I was on an episode of the Duck Tapes Podcast they called SVG with Chris Coyier: