alt Hacker NewsCSS-Tricks has a new owner
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I didn't expect this.
While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately, I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development.
Don't get me wrong, I think CSS-Tricks is a great resource and it has helped me over the years, but if I was in Geoff's shoes right now I'd be pretty scared.
Look at TailwindCSS for example, they had to reduce the size of their team and ended up joining Shopify to continue surviving. It is hard out here these days.
I don't want to sound too doom and gloom, so I wish Geoff the best of luck and I hope he succeeds.
Better preserve the current CSS-Tricks in archive.org or some other place before it is changed too much.
As an eng who spent over a decade on frontend and hasn’t touched CSS since last November, I’m ecstatic for this news.
Nothing a frontier LLM has built me in the last year has been satisfactory to me. Every detail was shipped after millions of tokens stripping back and optimizing what Fable/Opus started doing.
The process is leaner and faster, but frontend isn’t “solved” just because LLMs exist.
Nice! Digital Ocean was definitely not a great owner for the site, and it clearly wasn't treated as much of a priority under their ownership. Hopefully Geoff will give it the attention it deserves, especially given he's already the most active contributor there.
I wish I didn't have such a bleak outlook for community-focused tech publishing. Sites like LWN and 404 Media seem to be hanging on, but they're more likely the exceptions that prove the rule.
My paycheck for the better part of a decade came from publications run by a large tech company in an arrangement not too dissimilar from DO's relationship with CSS-Tricks. It was great while it lasted, but shortly after I left it was the first thing on the chopping block when the layoffs started. That was 3-4 years ago and the landscape for quality tech publishing hasn't gotten any easier.
Did DigitalOcean forget they owned CSS-Tricks? Because that's what seemed to have happened based on the limited notes on the subject I've read in the past few weeks.
It's a bold move. Educational material -- particularly frontend -- is an ever-shrinking pie, so Geoff is betting on claiming a very large share of that. I hope it pays off.
Awesome! Really happy for Geoff to be afforded the opportunity to bring CSS Tricks back to life.
Just goes to show that you can always make the world a better place with a little bit of luck and a lot of well placed effort. Kudos also to the pressure people put on Digital Ocean to do right by CSS Tricks and kudos to DO for allowing Geoff to take the site independent after their priorities changed.
For a website about CSS it is ironic how awful it looks on mobile.
Nice! CSS-Tricks served me well over the years with whatever limited web-dev I did. I'm glad it's not actually shutting down. And if the author is reading this, I hope you can ignore all the nay-sayers. There are people who still want to actually know their tools instead of leasing their brain from Anthropic, and there's been a shortage of great teachers.
This has recently been a fairly wild journey to watch from the outside.
Best of luck to Graham. I've got no idea how they'll make CSS-Tricks work as an indy blog in this era, but I hope they do make it work.
I remember learning the very basics of webdev from CSS Tricks. Years and years ago. They've been with me for my entire career and I am happy to see them independent again.
This is great news! I love CSS-Tricks and have bookmarked a lot of their articles over the years. We need reliable sources of learning material that isn’t just LLM-generated to make a quick buck. LLMs by their very nature cannot be trusted, even if they can be a great additional tool for learning.
Quality information is hard to come by these days and I admire everyone who take on the responsibility and cares enough to keep those sources available and healthy, even through uncertain times.
Can you give me proper credit on https://css-tricks.com/tricky-textarea-pulltab/?
Chris acknowledged credit in the comments but never updated the "I saw it maybe a year ago but I can’t for the life of me remember where." after I pointed out that he had seen and commented on my Codepen* of this trick.
CSS tricks is a shining testament to consistency and not falling for trend-chasing. I love how laser focused they are on covering purely CSS and making it fun to keep up with CSS news. Sounds like they're on a good path right now, and he's convinced in his choice to take full control.
Super happy the site.
There was a time when any CSS related question I'd type into Google would ultimately lead to CSS-Tricks.com.
This is a refreshingly candid article and was an absolute breath of fresh air. Wishing all the best to the team.
quite brave move, when it looks like it's not worth to learn anything anymore, wont get a job anyways and stores are flooded with apps.. and ww3 is going on..
Renaming guest writers "urkels" is pretty cute
"You urkel, yet? I've no idea why I waited so long ..."
"Duuuude just urkel and boost your professional/career visibility"
Independent publishing is very important but really tough, as curl can serve as an example.
Ads, affil, ebooks, membership, voluntary payments (Wikipedia’s fundraising header can be used as template)… Implement everything and don’t be shy.
Good luck, I guess, but in 2026 "CSS Tricks" seems about as relevant as "PostScript Tricks" or "Office Open XML Tricks". Human manipulation of CSS is going to be, at best, a hobby for a few dedicated tinkerers. And I say that as someone who invested a significant amount of the last 20 years getting good at CSS.
learning css is going to go the way of learning jquery. at this stage with AI, having a fundamental grasp on css is about all you need. with the stuff that claude and company can produce, do anyone really code css by hand anymore?
Don't do ads.
I am pessimistic. I hope I am wrong. In the age of AI, content websites are trying to find a new identity for themselves. CSS-Tricks are great resources for the tinkerer and imagineer. What kind of products and services can be offered to this niche? courses? ads? donation buttons? Nope. Innovation, maybe. Paywalled css tools like color palette, or smartArt type demos. The problem is that these tools require a dedicated staff just for billing, user support, and maintenance. Say 10% of the revenue goes towards the existing CSS tricks team. That is $20 million dollars worth of annual revenue needed. $10 per user. 2 million users. If they are lucky I expect them to get 300k users. That makes it $60 per user.
There is either going to be a layoff, a price increase, or I don't know.
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I run a similar-in-spirit site about starting from scratch on a project and getting to something functional. I tried both ads and courses, in my case neither were very successful. The most success I had was in offering to do the things the site tells you how to do in exchange for money. That's been my full time job for the last 6 years. I don't know if that's workable in the UI/UX world.
I've done only a small amount of web-design work over the years, but I can imagine that, if I landed on CSS-tricks trying to work out a tricky (to me) CSS or usability problem where LLMs had been failing me, and I had a quick and easy option to pay a few hundred dollars and meet with the guy who wrote the book, I might do that. That's also how I got a lot of my first customers in my current business; I offered paid phone calls where a user could pay a nominal rate and ask some upfront questions about a project they were working on. Many of those calls turned in to longer contracts, and the fee kept out the folks who were just looking to sell me something.
A lot of my customers have been organizations whose focus is not my industry, but, for one reason or another, they needed something done that fits in my wheelhouse. This means they don't (yet) want to hire this expertise and build processes internally, so they're willing to pay my premium rates. Perhaps there is a way to target these types of companies with custom services in the space.