I just read the news that Geoff Graham has acquired CSS-Tricks from DigitalOcean.
CSS-Tricks has been around for almost 20 (yes, twenty!) years now, and it has been instrumental in teaching me a lot of what I know about CSS, HTML, WordPress and web development in general. And I am sure that’s true for many others.
Digging into WordPress, written by CSS-Tricks founder Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr of Perishable Press, was possibly one of the first books I read about WordPress development and theming (in print, even!). CSS-Tricks has helped me understand the difference between git rebase and git merge. It was also the place where I first read about new color features in CSS, where I learned how to tame the cascade with BEM, and where I got an intro to the then-new concept of block themes, to mention just a few. And it always did so with a touch of humor and fun, and without making you feel excluded, whether you had a university degree or not.
Speaking of formal degrees: many years ago, a friend of mine who was studying computer science at university showed me the course material they’d been given to learn HTML and CSS. It turned out to be a huge stack of printed-out css-tricks.com posts, the same ones I’d been teaching myself with, which I found surprising and oddly reassuring.
Apart from all that other good stuff the site has published over the years, I don’t think there are any posts anywhere that I revisit as often as the guides to CSS Flexbox and Grid. Even today, with all the world’s magical answering machines slurping up that kind of content, I still reach for them whenever I want to understand something about these topics, and they’ve saved me countless hours.
When DigitalOcean acquired CSS-Tricks back in 2022, we all hoped that somehow this site would be the exception to the rule of enshittification. Unfortunately, these hopes were not met, and the site slowly started to decline. At least that’s how it felt from the outside. Some good posts were still being published, but you could feel that something wasn’t right, especially in recent months.
I can only applaud Geoff Graham for not just walking away, especially after things got difficult, and for sticking around long enough to now take over the site. This feels like a relief and like a new beginning.
I’m looking forward to seeing what all of this means for the future of CSS-Tricks.
Congrats to Geoff and the team – on to the next 20 years!