If you haven’t been paying attention, the CSS-Tricks website hasn’t published anything in more than four months (the last post was April 12, 2023), which happens to be around two months after Geoff Graham was laid off.
His post highlights that not only was he laid off out of the blue, but DigitalOcean was also still actively recruiting for other roles, too. In June, the Smashing Magazine team picked Geoff up and hired him as a technical editor.
I have been sitting on this headline for around two months now because I know for a fact that DigitalOcean has a history of acquiring these types of blogs and then merging them with their own Tutorials platform, which is hosted on DigitalOcean.
In 2019, DigitalOcean acquired Scotch.io – a cutting-edge blog for web development tutorials run by Chris Sev, which was then merged with DigitalOcean, and many tutorials were abandoned in the process, and many haven’t been updated since they were merged.
Here is a timeline of me trying to verify whether or not DigitalOcean plans to bestow the same fate to the CSS-Tricks platform,
- On July 8th, I send an email to the css-tricks@do email address and ask what’s the deal with no new posts being published.
- I followed up four times: July 14th, August 1st, August 3rd (press@do), and August 15th.
- On August 14th, I also sent an email to Chris Coyer, politely asking him if he happened to have any idea at all, to which he replied, “Very sadly, I just have absolutely no idea what they are doing or thinking.”.
- I woke up on August 17th with a tweet on my timeline that has nearly 80k views with the sentiment that “CSS-Tricks is dead”.
It’s a sad state of affairs because CSS-Tricks was one of the better platforms out there that grew to write not only about CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, but also the wider front-end ecosystem.
It also incentivized developers to share cutting-edge tutorials and guides through their guest writing program, which would award up to $400 per article based on its scope. That page now says that “submissions are temporarily closed”.
What about alternatives?
The only platforms that come even close to the resourcefulness of CSS-Tricks are the Mozilla Developer Network, and web.dev which is run by the Google Chrome team and open-source contributors.
I suppose that DigitalOcean doesn’t owe anyone an explanation, though, they paid their money for the platform, and they have the right to do whatever they please with it. I highly doubt that they couldn’t find a technical editor in this time to take it over, but that also begs the question of why let Geoff go in the first place.
CSS-Tricks has thousands of published pages, and letting the site sit stale like this for months on end means that content is getting more dated without regular updates.
If DigitalOcean reads this article or makes a comment on Twitter then I will update it, but by the looks of it – the future of CSS-Tricks is looking grimmer with each passing day.
