I think CSS-Tricks was a big blunder on DigitalOcean's side. That explains why they pulled the plug on all their resources. They believed they could get sizeable traffic towards DigitalOcean and their products, but soon they realized (or some marketing/strategy person in the company proved it) that the audience that cares about CSS and front-end won't likely be buying their products. Because if it was giving them the ROI, I see no reason why they would cut off all the resources. Their tutorials work because most of them are related to server administration that directly brings programmers who might be interested in DO's products.
Chris's proposal was a wild shot, but I do think the best way to move forward is to write-off the acquisition and either give it away or sell it. Otherwise, the site risks dying out slowly.
The money in CSS is selling $500 courses with the same
content as the free ones (because everyone is selling to beginners which is where the $ is), but with a great designer can make it look really sexy.
To be fair though, CSS is one of the things where a great designer who can make things look sexy might be worth that $500 to learn from. After all, your site looking better can translate to a lot of extra user engagement and money.
I'm sure you're right, but I wish the two were taught together more - the "how" (CSS syntax) and "why" (design principles) should really be approached together, with a bit of talking about accessibility thrown in.
Forget CSS and design principles, I’d be happy if folks just had a basic grasp of information hierarchy / content architecture and relevant semantic elements.
I don't know, I've done Josh W Comeau's CSS for JS Developers [0] and it was a very good course, teaching CSS from the ground up such that I save much more time now debugging CSS issues. However, I didn't pay for it, my company did (which is why the pricing is so expensive, it's to use up corporate education budgets).
Why did they not just advertise on the site instead? This current approach seems like the worst possible decision. Fair enough that they want ROI, but abandoning it isn't going to get you there. At least put a writer on it? At the time the PR speak [1] was "community" and "reach" but now they've not only wasted their money but are actively turning developers against them.
> “CSS-Tricks will broaden and complement our existing library of content, furthering DigitalOcean’s reach with both frontend and full-stack developers, and supports our community strategy, a key differentiator for DigitalOcean in the cloud computing space,” DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill said.
Digital Ocean invested in their apps product with static sites etc hoping to attract front end users from Vercel and Netlify. But their product was bad and no amount of advertising could change that.
I still visit the site a lot for the Flexbox guide. Hey, it's sad that it went down but if I were Chris, I would have sold it too probably. That's the way it is in the economy of the internets: maintaining a community resource that is above and beyond typical SEO junk is hard work and DEFINITELY does not pay what it should, considering it's real value to the community. (It probably would if large tech companies did not exist.)
Especially considering it's entirely possible if not probable that the fruits of that hard work will then be stolen by some SEO junk peddler and passed as their own. And yes, you can do things about that, but it's a lot of unpaid work, if you need a lawyer it's expensive unpaid work, and etc. etc. etc.
I would've absolutely sold it too and tbh, people giving Chris shit about it would have too, even if they won't admit it.
I still visit the site when a Google search sends me there, but otherwise I just read Chris' blog, since his posts were the only reason I ever went to css-tricks on a whim anyway.
Simply put, large tech companies have the scale to make their own operation too efficient, and much more efficient than everyone else. If that efficiency did not exist, smaller organizations would be more valuable to consumers and smaller folk could grab a larger section of the pie.
I do too but it's outdated. As a trivial example there's `place-content` which is not mentioned (it's in the comments). So, it's not the "Complete Guide to Flexbox" (I've learned the hard way not to name things so pretentiously)
Lots of stuff on the site is out of date. Some is just flat out wrong with comment closed. Maybe that stuff will get fixed if it's taken up again but many of these issues existed before it was sold.
I am forever grateful for the work Chris and his team did on CSS Tricks. It taught me a lot, but also brought a tone of fun and exploration to CSS…which at the time had so many inexplicable, demoralizing, quirks.
So…Chris…if you’re lurking this thread…thanks for what you made. It helped me out!
In the link related to Geoff being fired from CSS Tricks:
>Anyone who knows me well knows that I never have one job, but many eggs in a number of baskets.
That's one of the wisest approaches to life: having multiple sources of income so that in case you're laid off, it won't affect you that much -at least financially.
Totally, and something I'm trying to cultivate, but man is it a lot of work. Plus, its probably not even feasible for most people (kids, lack of savings to invest, etc.)
I'm lucky to have the time and money (more or less) to try to diversify my income, but I also am a bit annoyed that I need to in order to feel secure.
It should go far beyond money- the things that make you get up in the morning should be as many and as diverse as possible. Having enough stuff going on, even if you become poor, or sad, or lonely.
I miss that page so much. Honestly I kind of forgot about the buyout for a while and didn't notice the sudden lack of well-written articles about cool new CSS stuff – but one day I realized that nothing relevant has been in my RSS feed for a while and it seems like this won't change in the near future :/
Hey, amazing front-end content and I'm so happy that there are people trying to extend the knowledge of everyone with such attention to details.
One very small thing that hopefully comes off as constructive: The contrast of the text colors could perhaps be improved further? I mean you have zero a11y issues so it's not technically a problem really but somehow all feels too dark in general?
Anyway, thanks for the hard work for all involved.
This is not the first time digital ocean did something like this. And unlike some other commenter here saying they only did it because CSS tutorials don't give them ROI, extra information here is that they also did it with javascript tutorials, like scotch.io, so I am leaning towards to that DO just do poorly with their investment regardless. I wrote more about their track record in buying indie dev blog and then kill them in my newsletter last year when CSS-Tricks's editor got laid off: https://build.typogram.co/p/dont-sell-your-indie-business-to
I think Chris pointed out a very key fact: running site like css tricks or scotch.io takes a special mix of skill, organically the site grows big with one or two person with that right mix of skills, but once big corporate bought it and for whatever reason didn't retain that talent, they have to replace it with a team, which kills the ROI.
Quote from my newsletter “Don’t Sell Your Indie Business to Digital Ocean!”:
The sad part of the story is that most of what happened can’t be traced easily. Domain redirect can be set up with a few clicks of a button, and soon enough, most people forget these indie blogs ever existed and what happened to them. I want to write down what I saw so that there is a record of what Digital Ocean has done or has not done.
Back in 2014, I turned to Scotch.io to learn AngularJS. Scotch.io offered clear and concise tutorials that were easy to follow, even for someone who was new to the framework. I saved many tutorial articles to my browser’s bookmark; as I don’t clean up my bookmarks, I still have them saved up in my messy bookmark folder today.
One day I dug up and clicked on a scotch.io article from my bookmark and was surprised to see that it returned a “404 page not found” error. After some research, it turned out that Digital Ocean bought scotch.io, so consequently, the scotch.io home page got redirected to Digital Ocean’s homepage, and articles like the ones I saved were removed.
What was my problem with that? I didn’t know where to begin. Redirecting a blog to a product page with no context was just intentionally wasting my time — why would a visitor of a blog not be surprised to land on “Try Digital Ocean for free for 60 days”? And the cherry on top? Not setting up a wild card page rule to redirect all scotch.io article links to Digital Ocean, hence why I got a 404 error — they can’t even do their evil with efficiency. They wanted to milk this cow dry but had a leaky bucket — the stupidity, the carelessness, the insult to the editor who spent years creating quality content. Also, wasn’t Digital Ocean a service to host websites? Setting up page redirects is literally part of their service, and what a demonstration they had put on!
The above was what I witnessed in 2022. As of writing this article in February 2023, Digital Ocean has fixed some of the issues. Now all links of scotch.io redirect to the Digital Ocean community, which at least hosts some tech content. The original blog articles of scotch.io are still missing from the Internet. I searched for the titles that were saved to my bookmarks and couldn’t find them, on the Digital Ocean community or elsewhere. It is as if they were never written.
What triggers me to write down these words above as “record” is that Digital Ocean bought CSS Tricks — another beloved tech blog — about a year ago, and recently they laid off the only editor of CSS Tricks. It is entirely possible that one day we will lose access to CSS Tricks content like “A Complete Guide to Flexbox” — a front-end “staple food,” a link that always shows up in purple in search results; and instead, we get to enjoy losing 3 seconds of our life being redirected and then bounce.
Some of you may think that Digital Ocean will treat CSS Tricks more nicely, and that they won’t take down its quality content written over a decade of time. CSS Tricks is much more famous and high-profile than scotch.io, after all. I wouldn’t be too sure because of what happened to coding-fonts.css-tricks.com — go ahead, click on it. It is broken and just redirects to another page.
I launched a similar project called codingfont.com back in 2021, which is a tournament-style game to pick the winner coding font. Chris Coyier, the founder of CSS Tricks, wrote about it, which brought massive traffic to my site (Thanks, Chris! I am grateful as a fellow tinkerer). The article mentioned that CSS Tricks had built their own coding font microsite. Fast forward to May 2022, less than two months after CSS Tricks got bought, the CSS Tricks microsite was broken, and someone reported an issue on Github. Chris, who would be in an advisory role according to the Digital Ocean announcement, answered quickly:
> I’m afraid I’m not sure what Digital Ocean plans to do with it. I would, of course, vote for it to be re-hosted right at coding-fonts.css-tricks.com — and would be happy to help put it on Digital Ocean App Platform as well!
It was clear that Chris as an advisor wasn’t given any real access to decision-makers at Digital Ocean to make any difference in such a simple matter. It was such a simple and easy matter to solve that a bystander came forward and hosted the microsite somewhere else, ironically on Netlify — a competitor to Digital Ocean.
So there you go, another record I put down here in case Digital Ocean bothers to correct it one day, let the Internet remember that it had happened.
My open plea to Digital Ocean:
Stop this unethical business practice NOW! Your company buys these blogs to build a good reputation among the developer community, but clearly, the plan has failed. Instead, it hurts your brand, and I will never use your service. It is not too late to keep your promises — publish new content to the site, or at least keep the site alive and working as it is.
My appeal to other content creators: Don’t sell your indie business to Digital Ocean.
Well. I do use digitalocean and reading that they screwed up with CSS tricks did affect my perception of them. You screw Open Source/dev community only once. Then you spend decades trying to fix your reputation and fail at it. Just ask Microsoft.
Whatever they do, they should keep the site running and keep it on WP as its an endorsement of open source and a great demonstration of their platform in hosting the biggest website framework on the Internet. (~43% of all web sites and 30% of all ecommerce sites are WP at the moment).
Or they can improve their bottom line by shutting it down or by moving it to some other stack that has no relation with what people actually use in the wild and screw their reputation up forever.
they screw us more than once already. CSS Tricks is not their first victim, there is also scotch.io, where I learn Angular stuff. One day I tried to visit a saved article in my bookmark, the entire site and all its subpage are gone, and just redirect to digital ocean. That is more screwed than CSS Tricks is today, all that content, puff, gone!
Not a sellout. Think of it as an ordinary guy gets to middleman a big company rather than the usual make it and break it in house experience. It is no worse than someone holding DO stock and making a profit from that.
This site was amazing when I started front end development. I remember checking in from time to time and finally seeing the blunder with DO. DO was another starting point for me in my career when I was learning servers. Sad to see this outcome.
The email to the VP of Content & Community is wonderful, it covers a lot of detail and explains plainly why the idea would work. A great example for people wanting to get into freelancing, it's not for every client but once in a while you want to solve most of the problem in the first email. Why are you here? Why is this beneficial? Don't just ask "let's talk" or "maybe you have a project"... hand them the project on a silver platter and make them want to pay you. Almost worked it seems!
I respect Chris' decision to part with CSS-Tricks, it is a shame they couldn't figure out a better agreement for making sure the website continues to thrive but that is no easy feat. Onward and upward.
I see quite a few lamenting about the lost content and their bookmarks pointing to dead links. I built a bookmarking tool (https://showboard.ca), that allows you to store and organize that readable content (similar to pocket, instapaper, etc); meaning if those articles go dark, you won't lose their contents.
This is such an interesting attitude. I hope I don't inherit any of your projects. I have the opposite take... that the world needs him more than ever. Tailwind is the pump and dump of web development. I can definitely see the allure when it comes to hammering up the fastest possible prototypes with minimal knowledge required, but in reality it's 1 step forward and 10 steps back.
It's legacy is going to be more of bummer than a lot of folks realize I'm afraid. What are you going to do when the Product Manager comes in with the new design comps after you've hard coded all that html with the disparate output of ChatGPT and/or various pasted in snippets from libraries like Shadcn?
As a marketing consultant I personally created a couple of websites that gained a lot of traction (in their niches) for a big corporation. When I handed over the keys to the employees of said company, they stopped working on it after just of couple of weeks. They simply couldn't be bothered.
I was still hosting the websites. A year later they told me to pull the plug. I asked if I could take over the websites instead and continue to run the websites on my own. They were okay with that.
So they paid me handsomely for those websites and now they don't have any problem with me competing with their main site for some very attractive keywords. They also don't have a problem with me earning affiliate money through their own program, as well as their competitors.
Big corporations are just weird man. Online marketing is such an afterthought for many of them. And their employees simply don't care.
Exactly this i've tried myself, seen stuff of very obvious value thrashed because it didn't fit someones career-path, and seen million dollar projects just going in circles with no one knowing what they are doing but too proud to admit failure - very often there's a few people who see things very clearly in each company, but most people are just playing games.
In the smaller co-owned startups people have so many roles and have to be so absolutely tapped in everyone are talented, but the bigger the company, the more people are either just chillin' or working their life away on projects that are going nowhere, and there's seemingly little relation between skill, wages and position.
Sounds like a know it all - i know - but i'm seriously turned off after working at larger corps, to me it seems like mirror of an unjust society, which i think america and the west is to an increasingly absurd degree.
Chris's proposal was a wild shot, but I do think the best way to move forward is to write-off the acquisition and either give it away or sell it. Otherwise, the site risks dying out slowly.