Interestingly, DigitalOcean has a knack for acquiring these technical dev sites, in 2019 it acquired Scotch.io[0] which was one of the better technical web development sites out there.
Fun fact about Scotch, the founder (Chris Sev[1]) sold the site to DO, joined their team, and later managed to broker a deal to 301 redirect a lot of the pages to his new project Better.dev[2].
Absolute genius.
[0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/scotch-io-is-joining-digit...
Phonologically, it makes sense that it would gain traction as it's a means of avoiding the effort of the 'ere are' vowel combination. It's an addition rather than an elision, but the underlying motivation of saving effort is the same.
If he doesn't even proofread his headline, how sloppy will the rest of the site be?
Since it is informal, it can be read as "Hey I'm Chris Sev. Here's My [Collection/Set/List of] Courses", which is grammatically correct.
He starts with "Hey I'm Chris Sev" because it's a better headline, which is defined as something that is more likely to make people read the rest of the page. (Defined specifically because I see lots of complaints here that headlines should be descriptive of the actual content, which isn't really what matters, functionally. (I get the impulse though, really.))
It's the difference between written English and spoken English.
In conversation, it's not unusual for someone to use "here's" in this context. To be correct, especially for display in print or on a screen, the correct words are "here are."
I think that people use "here's" instead of "here are" because "here are" can be difficult to say quickly in conversation, and can sound like "herere," which is indistinct and unpleasant-sounding.
The internet has popularized the use of spoken English online because most English speakers speak English well enough, but fewer English speakers write English well.
i'm not really sure what they bought to be honest
And then eventually was redirected to DigitalOcean.
Also, just to add my own thought to this - CSS-Tricks is of course very loved by people who learned things there, and people who respect Chris Coyer as a designer. But, these acquisitions do have an effect on how people perceive a project, and skepticism is very high on that list.
They seem to be keeping the "Write for Us" option open, with 300$+ a pop per guest post + promotion to your project. If anything, it will become a haven for those kind of posts. If not, they might by some miracle find a really good person (dev or designer) who is willing to take on the reigns for a while. Unlikely, though.
Consider Hubspot buying The Hustle, Robinhood buying MarketSnacks, Stripe's various acquisitions (like IndieHackers), Insight Partners bought The New Stack.. and this is all happening in the developer space too. Subscription based companies with high cashflow but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because, frankly, the owners of the latter are generally quite happy with "modest" (<$40m, say) exits that the former can easily cover.
For those who are not familiar (if that's possible), check out https://cooperpress.com/publications/
To your (& Balaji's) point - one of tried and true methods of customer acquisition for SaaS is content marketing, but it's a very long game and you need to have quality content. Acquiring a blog or a media company that already has that has clear ROI.
DO already has a solid knowledge base of articles ("How to ... on Ubuntu Server" almost always leads to DO) but mostly for the back-end part of the stack. From that perspective, buying CSS-Tricks is not too surprising.
It diminishes their early insights to cast this acquisition as merely part of a trend.
I distinctly remember multiple Library articles getting rewritten about a week later and appearing on DO’s site with just enough distance to be unique, but it was clear that our work was on the screen while they wrote it based on document structure and technical approach (this was in the early “catch up” phase, roughly 2011-2012; it’s probably established enough now that this is no longer the case). More than once they not-so-subtly rewrote the technical approach to distinguish it and ended up breaking the instructions. They took verb ideas, they took X ideas, they took whole documents and shoved them in a blender with their systems. This is likely provable with Internet Archive but I’ve never bothered to look - I left Linode a decade ago.
I wouldn’t have left this seemingly negative for no reason comment had you not identified DO’s documentation strategy as an early insight. It was an early insight, but absolutely, definitively not theirs. They raised the VC to get exposed to this audience and successfully presented nearly all of Linode’s business insights as their own, and it’s understandable that it seems that way if you didn’t follow Linode before DO.
The first several years of DigitalOcean’s existence made it very clear they looked at Linode and said that, but with funding rounds. And that’s fine. They’ve done well. But let’s not attribute insights to their copies of things; their primary corporate insight all along was realizing Linode was handicapped with bootstrapped capital alone. And to give them credit, it was undeniably savvy to apply Linode’s successes to scaling DigitalOcean. It just means it’s not their ingenuity in any sense of the word.
I don't disagree with the thesis, but is the ROI actually there? Why not just pay the media company to be an exclusive partner? Maybe it's just putting the acquisition cost on the balance sheet instead of the income statement?
https://boingboing.net/2021/02/15/silicon-valley-investor-ca...
This was VC's way to invest in a media company.
The insane amount of SEO spam articles you get whenever you look for guides/examples on Google makes it almost impossible to rely on just searching on Google when you need it. So I'm finding myself having to go back to looking for curated lists of quality websites...
There is a lot of good stuff published that's hard to find. I wish I had a better catch all resource page.
Codepen.io is a good playground to play around with html/css/javascript and it has some javascript frameworkstuff too.
A lot of people put together good content. It seems to surface though blogs and twitter. Some links/papers we used (without the CSShints pages). A lot of them have more content if you explore.
https://cssclass.es/materials/#elements-and-tags
https://chenhuijing.com/blog/how-i-design-with-css-grid/#%F0...
https://www.wpkube.com/html5-cheat-sheet/
https://programmingdesignsystems.com/what-is-a-design-system...
https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/chapter-1/
http://alistapart.com/article/the-king-vs-pawn-game-of-ui-de...
https://brucelawson.co.uk/2018/the-practical-value-of-semant...
https://alistapart.com/article/my-accessibility-journey-what...
Articles are discussed here often: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=joshwcomeau.com
DO has some really great documentation for their services so I am hopeful they will only enhance/make-better css-tricks.
If a DO link is returned in my search, I tend to click on it.
PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.
Only a shame they rolled out all the affiliate credits. In the first year I generated like $1,500 in affiliate revenue from a single review post I did.
At the rate of $5 per droplet, that's 25 years worth of hosting. I didn't get the full 25 but still happy to pay for their services.
One can hope that a tweet gets picked up by HN or other media to get their attention, but alas, such is not typical.
I have a Droplet I haven't accessed in 7 years. I'm pretty sure if I look at it the wrong way it will break, but it's been running the same app with no downtime like a champ.
also, the "popular this month" thing on the top front of css-tricks.com is buggy as hell (buttons go flying left and right depending on where you move the mouse, and other things, not sure how its even meant to be displayed)
i have another rant now: why do devs lack basic awareness which would be required to be aware of the fact that lazy loading content is bad for the user experience? is it because they are paid $100K-$200K (for now, this trend wont last forever) starting salaries in their bubble with fast connections? literally every single country outside the west has slow computers and internet, and every single piece of modern software are unusable on them. in the US meanwhile, you cant get fast internet either and 50% of users are on mobile which also once again brings you back to square one.
like wtf imagine being SOOO unaware of how your product is used that you think its only used on Reference hardware. seriously what have webdevs done in the last 14 years while i wasnt looking? i dont see one single thing that was improved. im pretty sure what happens is in their world they are hyper focused on some little head scratcher like "making this UI element be able to be hooked up in a declarative document cleanly in this specific way and having a declarative model of how it interacts with these other declarative components" and dont realize everything still sucks overall and is getting worse. none of that should be surprising though, because the web already obviously a bad idea 30 years ago when people decided that website owners should be able to make users do shit before being able to read/view the content
Are you sure that was in the original spec?
Just saved flexbox and grid guides using the SingleFile extension, something I discovered a couple of weeks ago here on HN. HN warns and provides solutions.
flexbox https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
grid https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/
Words are hard
this number is public: https://css-tricks.com/thank-you-2021-edition/
total traffic 88m, flexbox is 6.7m of that. speaks to their deep bench tbh.
DO seems to value quality over quantity for documentation. Documentation appears to be their 'doing well by doing good' strategy. What BackBlaze is to hard drive reviews, DO is to a subset of platform agnostic cloud technologies. I don't know what they do now, but at one point a couple years ago they were soliciting 'paid' articles, but rather than paying you directly they would make a donation to an organization on their list on your behalf.
If I were telling an intern where to look for technical knowledge on the internet, my advice would be something like this: start at their website (mostly for due diligence, since 4/5 times you won't find what you want there), Stack Overflow, Google, Digital Ocean, and then look for either books by the authors (if you're a bookish sort), or find conversations with the authors on the internet.
Though now Google is falling fast. I'm on the cusp of demoting it below DO. I feel that camel straining under the weight on its back. SEO is turning into Search Engine Sabotage lately.
If DO starts buying up knowledge bases that could flip for positive reasons instead of negative ones.
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/
Also, requesting your non-flexbox layout for your documents on how to do flexbox seems rather ironic.
To generate a ton of traffic or be worth something, I find you need to balance three things (personal opinion):
- Normal longer Blog type articles / announcements
- Quick blog / library / resource / how-tos
- Engagement / community
Each are unique for everyone.
For example, Cloudflare I would argue leans heavy to the longer blog rolls and is a lead gen for enterprise reads, investors, and also new hire folks.
For SEO though, Digital Ocean cares more about the library of resources style (I would wager). It’s why they are buying CSS-Tricks to get all that “smooth scroll css” traffic. This is very much a traffic is traffic mentality to boost their own blog traffic metrics. There are probably other factors here like community / clout. Why build all this when you can just buy it?
Then finally the last one is engagement. This is what converts and is having an active community. This is why influencers can make serious buck. This is the hardest to build and I would argue the most important. A “real following”.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this too and how you use your blog for your start up or business.
Google loves old domains with authority, and still, to this day, it's a lot easier to rank a site built on an aged/expired domain than it is on a fresh domain.
Buying powerful domains on auction sites has shot through the roof in the last couple of years. Here's a couple of example on Godaddy (Godaddy auctions tend to have the most powerful domains SEO-wise) https://www.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/gutenberg-net-414405... https://uk.godaddy.com/domain-auctions/freewebtemplates-com-...
I imagine they will eventually 301 the domain to the main DigitalOcean domain.
Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.
Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
- Target long-tail searches -- queries where there may not be a lot of volume but also not a lot of competition
- Stand out with very good content (not just SEO filler)
- Build trust with the dev community
This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy. So acquiring large tranches like this makes sense.
That is to say, syndicated content is already a part of their SEO strategy. The question now is how they’ll fit CSS Tricks into that mosaic. Maybe just simple ads and links? Maybe moving it under the DO domain with 301s? We shall see.
I think they shouldn't touch it and let CSS-Tricks continue to do their own thing.
Margins are pretty great for app platform so that's an area I would expect investment in.
Historically, CSS-Tricks has raked in a TON of money from affiliate sales to entry level hosting providers (MediaTemple sticks out in my mind). Imagine all of those affiliate sales now going to Digital Ocean instead. There's potential for a massive ROI if DO can responsibly manage the site and funnel over the next decade.
> Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services
Because CAC are high and LTV can always be higher
Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.
Congratulations Chris. Me and others owe our careers in webdev and our CSS sourcery magic to your great articles.
I was almost expecting that text to be a link to zombo.com
Congratulations, Chris!
It was actually very nice for it's time, I wonder if anyone from DO remembers this.
Edit: See http://jessecha.se/work/buoy.html
I don’t know if I trust DO as his „successor“, I’ve lost way too much money on their platform for me to consider them trustworthy. And that’s coming from a person who now uses Oracle Cloud.
I could see them using this for both subtle (the header/footer links etc) and more "sponsered" content (i.e. links to DO AppPlatform in an article/tutorial about next.js etc)
Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?
But even still, I'm mainly an infra/devops/backend guy who occasionally needs to hack on front end, and I've ended up at CSS Tricks a number of times. So it's probably a great buy if used as an advertising hole and to boost SEO credibility.
DO is loved by developers, and so is CSS Tricks. DO bought it because of the cozy relationship CSS Tricks has with developers and vice-versa.
> [no]
Shame. Thanks for all the help over the years Chris!
If so beware.
Dang, TIL, it was a business.
We will miss you CSS-Tricks.
I wouldn't be surprised to see it start pivoting to look like the Cloud9 IDE (or Fog Creek's Glitch) of DigitalOcean, though.
