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].
This is part of a broader trend. Last year, Balaji Srinivasan tweeted about the idea of SaaS companies buying media companies – https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1374363031417753609 – and as an observer/operator in this space, I've heard about a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes with larger companies expressing an interest in smaller media companies (including my own - I value autonomy too much but for the right multiple.. :-D).
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.
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.
> but high customer acquisition costs will continue to buy attention-based companies with relatively low acquisition costs because,
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?
I think Balaji is more interested in having SaaS create their own Ministry of Information to do their PR instead of needing to rely on journalists who seem to be generally unfriendly to him.
Hope they keep the site as it is, css-tricks.com has been consistently one of the best, if not the best CSS site around, to the point that I search there for a particular topic before going to general purpose search engines, and you'll frequently find Chris' original articles copypasta'd by "content marketers" anyway. I guess the big time push for CSS3 with ever-changing responsive requirements and new UI idioms of the 2000's and 2010's is behind us, as witnessed by css-tricks's forum with contributions from other world-class experts having closed down last year or so. Could be worse than DO for sure.
I'm actually pretty optimistic about this - DigitalOcean does great work around docs and tutorial type sites. Half of the time when I search for things like, "how to install nvm on Ubuntu 20.04" a digital ocean article comes up, and it's really well done.
Are there any similar websites but for web development in general (not just CSS)? Because this one is amazing!
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...
I'm kind of hoping the reverse happens, and the front end devs at Digital Ocean get some lessons in responsive design and browser compatibility. I love the Digital Ocean product, but their dashboard is just full of quirks that give me the impression that the devs there just test things out in Chrome at one window size and then peace-out for happy hour.
Whether it be setting up a LAMP stack on a server, securing nginx with Lets Encrypt, deploying a python ML model as a web service, you name it, DigitalOcean's tutorials just work. Thanks Digital Ocean!
PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.
I've been a DO customer since 2013 and never in that time have I hosted any of my sites or apps on other platforms. They're super good in every department; support, pricing, tools, and of course, tutorials.
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.
Without their tutorials, I would never have tried to do any of the things I'm doing for myself. Been a customer for many years after learning about it on HN. My employer has been a customer for almost as long since I use it to run a server for my teaching (thereby eliminating the need for me to do tech support for my students, which I hate). Their tutorials have brought in quite a few thousands in revenue just from me.
wtf? i came across some tutorials there for work (aka the place where we dont do things properly because we arent pad to do so) and it was all script kiddie crap targeting some specific ubuntu distro that wont work next month (or worse, all i remember was that this was particularly egregious and even worse than all the other tutorial crap ive seen in that period of time). these blogs have been common since the 2000s as a simple place to make ad revenue with little effort. they were never good and only come on the radar because they easily drown out actual real content on search engines.
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
Their guides are indispensable for my occasional dabbling.
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.
As others have said in other threads, I don't think you have much to worry about.
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.
Their Flexbox and Grid guides are the best. I've been using both since pretty much the start and I still look up syntax from them at least once a week.
Their flexbox article kind of ended my (hobbyist) interest in front end styling. I just turn everything into flexboxes and everything behaves just like I want it to. And yes I do visit it every time I do front end styling.
For your start up, a good blog could be a serious lead vehicle.
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.
It's already been mentioned in a few comments, but I imagine a big part of this purchase was influenced by the SEO power of the domain. CSS-Trick is a crazy powerful domain [1]
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.
I’ll be the first to say: congrats to Chris! Just an excellent guy - and he’s been contributing so much good writing to the web development community for so long, he deserves a pay day.
This is one of the few instances where I can say I trust the acquiring company. I've been a fan of DigitalOcean since I started using them. They haven't given me a reason to dislike them. And like the post says, they do write some handy tutorials. One that's helped me a few times is how to spin up a quick FTP server on Debian, because for some reason I can never configure it right.
Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.
I've spent some time with Digital Ocean team members, and they're dead-set on having the best technical content on the internet. It's been a core to their growth strategy so far:
- 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.
DO has really been expanding their SEO in terms of the generic "How to install X on Ubuntu" search term (albeit, this is particular for CSS-tricks). I often see them ranked near the top for many of these searches. I think it's a great addition if that's what DO is going for.
I think @XCSme stated it best with their comment: "...Web developers are a big slice of DO's target market...". I don't know about you but I firmyl believe that both CSS Tricks and Digital Ocean produce some great content for an audience that is undertaking their own web projects - like web devs. I use DO for my personal projects, and also dive into CSS tricks when i need to look stuff up. But i have to imagine that maybe DO is also seeking to get the business of folks who might not be web devs...maybe folks who would traditiuonally want to learn new stuff on the legacy shared web hosts, but who heard from their techie friends that they should move to a provider like DO (or linode, etc.) in order to grow. Maybe a bit of a long-tail audience, but who knows, maybe there are tons of them out there? These not-yet/not-really web dev folks often need a little helping hand - hence the need for more and better guides (not just tech guides, but hand-holding content)...so when i see things in that light, then this kind of acquisition makes sense...in fact, i would guess everyone wins; the consumers; CSS Tricks team; and DO...at least i hope.
I immediately had the same question. My current theory is that this will be used to attract front-enders to their App Platform (which they've been investing in and pushing hard for a little while now).
Margins are pretty great for app platform so that's an area I would expect investment in.
In some ways, CSS-Tricks is a competitor to Digital Ocean's technical article marketing strategy. They are pretty high up in the search results for plenty of different technical answers, even beating out StackOverflow pretty often.
I've been using the CSS-Tricks site since 2008. It's one of the best sites on internet and has great community of developers. Congrats to Chris Coyier and the team!
Why does DigitalOcean want to build their selection of content out? It's kind of weird. They don't need to become some big dev article repository/media engine. Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services (good as they may be). Happy for Chris and the team to get something (substantial?) back for their efforts and maybe free up their time, but having these openweb resources just be sucked up constantly by 'media conglomerate' strategies isn't the best feeling vs independent/somewhat isolated resources.
It's a shortcut for content marketing. I would expect a large number of articles over the next few months about launching projects on DO infra. Not a terrible way to get more eyeballs on your product, but if they push things too hard, eventually the site could lose some of it's appeal as a "neutral" source.
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.
More content allows you to increase your rankings in search results. Especially if you become an "authority" for a topic. More views to content pages gets you a chance to promote your products better than search results alone.
Does seem a bit of a strange fit for DigitalOcean. That said, they seem like a solid company and they really do have some really good tutorials/knowledgebase.
Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.
Not that strange. DigitalOcean has (or had?) a great forum for asking tech questions on setting up droplets and other DO services. It was very community driven. I relied on it often when I first made my VPS back in 2013.
I (and I'm sure many others here) owe my career to Chris. HTML never "clicked" for me, until I watched one of his screencasts breaking down a design and building a page from scratch. The rest is history.
CSS Tricks played a critical part in teaching me about web designs. It was a paradise for an introvert like me to hangout at, and also learn new skills.
This reminds me of a little known fact that Digital Ocean almost had their own UI kit, I posted a question on HN 5 years ago asking if anyone had used it. It was called Buoy.
It was actually very nice for it's time, I wonder if anyone from DO remembers this.
I’m sad to see Chris step down from CSS Tricks, loved his designs, content moderation and writing style.
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.
CSS Tricks was the biggest help back when I was first teaching myself proper web design and then doing freelance web development back in my early days. Chris Coyier and Ryan Bates (of Railscasts) alone taught me 80+% of what I needed to know to get my start in the industry.
Congratulations to them. I’ve always respected css-tricks for their sensible approach to online advertising: no malware distributing ad networks, just selling ad spots to companies that the audience of a css and web dev focused website might be interested in.
Congrats! I've referenced the site for my entire programing life and really like it a lot, but other than that I don't have much background on how it came to be. Does anyone know if Chris ever wrote about his motivations for or history of the site?
as other comments have pointed out, DO have a strategy of writing great documentation, for stuff that isn't immediately there's (e.g. iptables/ufw, terrafrom, docker etc), these benefit people both using their platform already, and draw others in (find docs, hey these are useful, what else do they do?).
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)
Last week I started poking around in some serious CSS again for the first time in ten years. I was a little rusty. CSS-Tricks definitely stood out for the quality. Truly helpful. I'm back in the swing of things now.
I've also recently heard of larger VC firms quietly (secretly) buying tech publications lately. There's a lot of value in the eyeballs -- perhaps also the narrative.
I don't really understand DigitalOcean's market here.
They're obviously. not going after the main cloud players, but it seems strange that they're targeting consumers directly. They spent a lot of time/money crowdsourcing documentation for things that weren't cloud-specific, like patching wordpress, installing apache etc, and now CSS-Tricks.
Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?
DO recently rolled out their "App Platform" which is targeted at developers who don't know much infra/devops. I would guess promoting that is what drove this decision since CSS Tricks has such a good name/reputation with the exact target market. Ads (especially subtle ads) placed on CSS Tricks would be worth a fortune.
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.
Does this mean that DigitalOcean has become another platform company that is monitoring their customers’ business performance for possible acquisition?
Did you miss the giant frontend masters sidebar sticky on the side of every article for the past 2+ years? Chris was making tens of thousands off that ad each month.
skilled|4 years ago
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...
[1]: https://twitter.com/chris__sev
[2]: https://www.better.dev/
archerx|4 years ago
vohu43|4 years ago
the_common_man|4 years ago
mouzogu|4 years ago
[deleted]
petercooper|4 years ago
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.
senko|4 years ago
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.
makk|4 years ago
It diminishes their early insights to cast this acquisition as merely part of a trend.
mbesto|4 years ago
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?
rchaud|4 years ago
tiffanyh|4 years ago
This was VC's way to invest in a media company.
tannhaeuser|4 years ago
jjcm|4 years ago
mardifoufs|4 years ago
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...
Eric_WVGG|4 years ago
kosasbest|4 years ago
reflectiv|4 years ago
DO has some really great documentation for their services so I am hopeful they will only enhance/make-better css-tricks.
throwra620|4 years ago
[deleted]
ElectronShak|4 years ago
PS: I love the Idea of calling a single server a "Droplet" in the "Digital Ocean". Nice one DO.
skilled|4 years ago
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.
raiyu|4 years ago
bachmeier|4 years ago
unixbane|4 years ago
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
bradly|4 years ago
wildrhythms|4 years ago
helipad|4 years ago
jostylr|4 years ago
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/
PaulBGD_|4 years ago
hinkley|4 years ago
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.
cehrlich|4 years ago
nyanpasu64|4 years ago
Traubenfuchs|4 years ago
nojs|4 years ago
Zardoz84|4 years ago
TIPSIO|4 years ago
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.
Matsta|4 years ago
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.
[1] - https://imgur.com/a/8XHWry9
lelandfe|4 years ago
seanw444|4 years ago
Congrats to the original owner on getting acquired, and by a company that will most likely do well with it.
michaelcampbell|4 years ago
gotts|4 years ago
Is it some kind of purchase of real estate for future permanent advertisement of DO?
electric_muse|4 years ago
- 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.
lelandfe|4 years ago
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.
gzer0|4 years ago
mxuribe|4 years ago
rozenmd|4 years ago
freedomben|4 years ago
Margins are pretty great for app platform so that's an area I would expect investment in.
ehnto|4 years ago
xboxnolifes|4 years ago
novateg|4 years ago
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
yurishimo|4 years ago
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.
alx__|4 years ago
conductr|4 years ago
> Other than to consistently push devs consuming the content towards their services
Because CAC are high and LTV can always be higher
bilekas|4 years ago
Sounds like a good time to sell it off though and hope they have the same success with future projects.
azemetre|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
WrtCdEvrydy|4 years ago
XCSme|4 years ago
Jerrrry|4 years ago
Congratulations Chris. Me and others owe our careers in webdev and our CSS sourcery magic to your great articles.
bjarneh|4 years ago
I was almost expecting that text to be a link to zombo.com
ramesh31|4 years ago
mamoriamohit|4 years ago
Congratulations, Chris!
jppope|4 years ago
CommanderData|4 years ago
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
merlinscholz|4 years ago
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.
ravenstine|4 years ago
nkrisc|4 years ago
PascLeRasc|4 years ago
cphoover|4 years ago
mxuribe|4 years ago
plexiglas|4 years ago
ru552|4 years ago
tehbeard|4 years ago
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)
datavirtue|4 years ago
electric_muse|4 years ago
awill|4 years ago
Wouldn't consumers who'd benefit from these sorts of tutorials prefer a properly managed solution rather than an IaaS?
freedomben|4 years ago
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.
kosasbest|4 years ago
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.
daqhris|4 years ago
kizer|4 years ago
TAKEMYMONEY|4 years ago
> [no]
Shame. Thanks for all the help over the years Chris!
worldmerge|4 years ago
riazrizvi|4 years ago
If so beware.
detaro|4 years ago
omarhaneef|4 years ago
jpswade|4 years ago
smashah|4 years ago
cssrider|4 years ago
Dang, TIL, it was a business.
We will miss you CSS-Tricks.
bdlowery|4 years ago
rezmason|4 years ago
technotarek|4 years ago
riffic|4 years ago
I wouldn't be surprised to see it start pivoting to look like the Cloud9 IDE (or Fog Creek's Glitch) of DigitalOcean, though.