To be honest, sometimes writing this article feels like a chore for years. A comprehensive review of what happened throughout the year is somewhat obligatory for a site like this, especially when it’s a tradition that stretches back to 2007.
This year is different. Quite different. I couldn’t even write this article last year, so I’m even more grateful this time. This time last year, I was a full-time student, intent on completing my master’s degree while working a part-time contract job.
But now that I’m back, it feels very, very good to write this. If you say “Thank you very much!”, you will be more motivated to write. It’s because of you and your support of this site that I was able to get back to my regular job. I would be careless if I didn’t say so, so I would like to express my sincere gratitude and gratitude. thank you!
Let’s tie a bow on this year and recap what’s happened around here in 2024.
overall traffic
Is it worth saying something about traffic? Like other blogs about front-end development, page views on this site have been on the decline since 2020, but they stopped completely when the site was down for over a year. decreased to Things started moving again in late May, but it wasn’t until probably near mid-June that the engines were fully fired and normal publication resumed.
And yes. Regular publication brought in an influx of new page views. It’s funny how just turning on the light can change things so much.
After all, there were 26 million unique pageviews in 2024. This was exactly the number in 2023 when traffic was down. So I would call this year a victory for stopping the bleeding and reaching breakeven.
publication
Let’s look back on a little history about the number of articles we publish each year.
2020: 1,183 articles 2021: 890 articles (site acquired by DigitalOcean) 2022: 390 articles 2023: 0 articles (site temporarily suspended) 2024: 153 articles (site resumed in late June)
Going from 0 articles to 153 (including this one) in six months was no easy task. I was the only writer on the team until around October. It’s just the three of us now. Still, we are all very part-time workers. Between us and the 19 guest authors, I would say we exceeded expectations in terms of volume. But I’m even more proud of the effort and quality that goes into each piece. If we keep up this momentum, I can easily imagine publishing over 400 articles by 2025.
Case in point: We published a whopping three guides in six months.
This may not sound like a big deal, so let me put it in context. We only published one guide in 2022, and our goal was to publish three guides in 2021. We’ve published three guides this year alone, and they’re all really great. I refer to Juan’s Anchor Positioning guide as much, if not more, than the old Flexbox and Grid guides.
In addition, we’ve added 34 new additions to the CSS-Tricks Almanac. This includes all the features of anchor placement and view transitions, as well as other new features such as @starting-style. And the reason we spent so much time on the yearbook is because we did a few important things…
Site updates
Since we’ve spent the better part of a year here, let’s break it down into easy-to-understand parts.
almanac
I refreshed the whole thing! Where before it was just selectors and properties, you can now write at rules and functions to pseudos and everything in between. We still need a lot of help, so why not consider writing with us as a guest? 😉
table of contents
We’ve been embedding anchor links in article section headings for several years, but that required the use of WordPress blocks and was quite limited in terms of placement and customization. We now automatically generate these links and include conditions that allow you to turn them on and off for specific articles. I’m currently writing an article about how it all came together. It will be released after the holidays.
Precautions
There’s a new section to take notes on what others are writing and share their gist. The motivation was to lower the bar for writing more freely. Technical writing requires a lot of attention and planning, which is not compatible with learning and sharing openly. This way we had a central place to see what we were learning and join in along the way. For example, here’s a set of notes I took from Bramus’ great free course on scroll-driven animation.
link
This is another area of the newly painted grounds. Well, it’s more than just paint. Previously, the link was in the same stream as the rest of the articles, tutorials, and guides we publish. Links are meant to be conversation starters, light and shareable. Dividing it into independent sections from the main feed reduces noise on this site, puts a brighter spotlight on your links, and shortens the path to the original article. Just like with new resources for learning anchor locations, it’s much easier to do.
quick hit
We’ve introduced another piece of new content in the form of short one-liners that we typically post on Mastodon and Bluesky. We still post on these platforms, but now we can post on the site and push it as needed. There’s more flexibility there, even if you don’t have enough love yet.
pick
There’s a new feed of articles we’re reading. It may seem a lot like a link, but the idea is that you can simply “star” something from your RSS reader and it will appear in your feed. Even if you don’t have any comments to contribute, they’re simply interesting articles that caught our attention and we’d like to spotlight and share. This was Chris’ idea a few years ago and I’m so glad it came to fruition. I’ll write something about it after the break, but it’s okay if you’re already heading there.
Baseline status
Oh, this is fun! When we saw the Chrome team roll out a new web component for embedding web platform browser support information into pages, we wanted to turn it into a WordPress block that could be used throughout the yearbook. We’ve already started rolling it out. Content is published or updated (here, for example in the anchor-name property). We’re still writing about it, but if you’d like to get it on your WordPress site, we’ve already made it available in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Or drop it here… and let me show you.
post slider
This was one of the first things I made when I rejoined the team. More articles on the homepage to make it easier to find specific types of content, such as the latest 5 articles, the 10 most recently updated yearbook items and guides, or classic CSS tricks from years ago. I wanted to display it. thing. So instead of just showing the latest 10 posts, we developed a series of post sliders that pull from different areas of the site. By converting your existing post slider component to a WordPress block, we made it more portable and much easier to update your homepage and any other pages or posts that require a post slider. In fact, this is another one I can demo here…
So, yeah. This year we have put more effort into development than in past years. But everything was done with the goal of making content easier to discover, publish, and share. We hope this is like a small punch on the gas pedal that accelerates our ability to bring you fresh content.
2025 goals
I’m very reluctant to articulate new goals when so many things are still in flux, but the planner in me can’t help myself. If I could imagine a day when I could look back on things exactly like this at the end of next year, I would be happy, no, I would be very happy, if I could say that we did something like this.
Publish a new guide or two. Two are already in development. That said, the bar for the quality of these guides is set so high that it still takes time to plan and publish two good, thick guides. Please write it in your yearbook. Oh, there’s so much to do in this little corner of the site. The recently created at-rules and functions sections only have a few pages and could use all the help available. We will restart the newsletter. This is something I’m itching to do. I know I miss reading the newsletter (especially when Robin was writing it), but this community feels so small and quiet without it. The last issue was published in December 2022, and the time has come to publish it again. Nuts and bolts are still in place. All we need is a little extra resources and the will to do it, and at least half of that is covered. There will also be guest authors. I mentioned earlier that I’ve been working with 19 guest authors since June of this year. That’s great, but it’s not enough, considering this site thrives on bringing in outside voices from which we can all learn. We’ve obviously been busy with development and all sorts of other site updates, but this year we’ve refocused our writing program and made it our priority to submit ideas and receive timely feedback on them as smoothly as possible. I am thinking of doing so. And you get paid for what’s published. It’s a lot of invisible work, but it’s worth everyone’s effort because it’s a win-win-win-win (authors win, readers win, CSS-Tricks wins, DigitalOcean wins).
Now until 2025!
thank you. That’s the most important thing I want to say. And a big thank you to Juan Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Trimble. In case you didn’t know, they joined the team this fall and have been really incredibly helpful. I wish every team had Juan and Ryan like me. We’d all be better off that way, that’s for sure. I have learned so much from them and I know you will (or have!) learned the same way.
Juan Diego Rodriguez
Ryan Trimble
If you see them, give them a high five. Because they deserve it. ✋
