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halorocks1214 · 3 years

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would you mind elaborating a bit more on the c!phil and c!techno post? not saying you’re wrong in the least, it’s just an interesting opinion I haven’t seen before! I was curious about the reasons?

*waddles in* okay im finally back from class and have a real keyboard to use for this yeehaw

to keep my feelings brief cuz im aware im biased- inniter both proud and shameful ✊😔- there's a trend i've noticed about certain types of content recently that has some symmetry to what was going on at the beginning of the year. but unlike those few months ago, most people seem to be reacting positively to today's stuff

the bedrock bros arc in particular had a lot of discourse surrounding it, especially after the mutual betrayal. many c!tommy fans would rightfully point out how it was a lil eff'ed up that c!techno kind of sort of lied to c!tommy about his real intentions and was dodgy when c!tommy tried pointing out how that's not what he wanted to do ("we'll smooth out the finer details later" or w/e the quote was)

in response, it felt like a cacophony of people claimed how techno was his own character, that he didn't need to be some random kid's caretaker, to the point that the whole "characters shouldn't be judged by how they treat c!tommy" take was created

nowadays i'm seeing c!rivals duo material come out of the woodwork like a flood. a lot of people want c!dream to join the syndicate, have him heal out in the tundra with c!techno after the piglin breaks him out of pandora's vault and away from his torture

now, there are quite a few reasons why i and many others aren't a fan of this idea, but this post is about how c!techno shouldn't be reduced down to any character's therapist! he has his own plotlines with his own motivations, certainly, those same people will at least point out that c!dream fans want a similar story that c!tommy fans did back in december and january, right?

😐

then there's the man the myth the legend c!philza himself, coining the title schrodinger's father for a good few months. with the canonicity of the sbi family dynamic being somewhat wonky (not deconfirmed however), people split harshly into two categories: those who liked the idea of c!phil still being c!tommy's father, and those who very very very much did not

regardless of people's true opinions on the matter, c!tommy fans (fairly) pointed out that c!phil destroying the kid's home right in front of him was a little messed up. c!phil was canonically aware that c!dream was up to something funky, yet he still went through the idea of teaming up with him to raze l'manberg into the ground, which stung c!tommy enthusiasts a little. who wouldn't be just a smidge butthurt about something like that happening to their fave?

like clockwork, lots of people criticized and even outright bemoaned this train of thought. c!phil isn't even c!tommy's father who cares! he certainly doesn't need to, stop making everything about the kid! y'all just have daddy issues and are projecting tbh 🤪

now back to the prison arc, we yet again return to the potential plot of syndicate!dream, where he'll be best buddies with c!emerald duo and c!niki will spoonfeed him while he recovers (yes this is a /srs headcanon i saw) and c!ranboo will just have to "get over" his fear of c!dream to see they're actually best buds (another /srs comment someone made yes that is word-for-word what it said)

essentially, someone in discord shared a tweet that was basically talking about the idea of c!techno shoving c!dream into c!phil's lap saying "here, be a father whether you like it or not" and, well, i got somewhat peeved if that untagged post i made is anything to go by

it's starting to feel more and more like people didn't actually care that others were writing c!techno and c!phil in caretaker roles, they only cared that c!tommy was the one being taken care of. because c!tommy is apparently the literal spawn of satan and is the worst thing to happen to the dsmp and is super annoying and blah blah

but instead of, idk, admitting that c!tommy just wasn't their fave and moving on from content they didn't like, they needed to create these excuses about how it was actually super awful that these fans were doing things like this, that you should feel bad if you support this kind of content because you are ruining these characters and everything they stand for

nevermind that this kind of stuff has been a normal occurrence in fandoms since fandoms have been a definable thing, that while yes it gets annoying how certain characters are favored above all others literally all you're achieving by tearing down someone else's work is that same person either A.) making more of that stuff out of spite or B.) potentially quit making stuff for the fandom altogether

it's just... it sucks, that it feels like you can't want anything nice for c!tommy without it getting called "ooc" or being accused that you only watch his POV and make everything about him. maybe i'm sensitive, maybe im extrapolating, but i wouldn't be the only one who is, considering i've seen multiple others voice similar feelings regarding this situation

so there we have it i guess. my brief words that ended up not being brief at all (so sorry dear anon, i really did try to keep this down to one page at most :headinhands:) and i hope they make at least some partial sense, now i gotta go read even more random shit for my hw fsndkfjndf save me /lh

#dsmp critical #fandom critical #c!techno critical #c!phil critical #c!dream critical #negative #discourse #answered ask #anonymous

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calamariimpossible · 3 years

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Magicians on the internet, crypto, and the email that broke me.

This is a continuation of a twitter thread that Muz (@mzkrx) started to write out in his car but then when he plotted out his thoughts, it made more sense to him to put it down in a blog format rather than a thread. You'll find out why as you read through.

Stuck in the car for half an hour so I'm gonna do a thread (Editor's note: Now a whole-ass blog post) about a strange email I got recently.

So I was casually watching magic tricks on YouTube. the funnest part of which to me is reading the comments. YouTube commenters love explaining how they think the trick is done and it's fun to read through their theories and connect dots between similar tricks, etc.

And then one time as I was scrolling I noticed a comment that didn't make sense. It was a string of an almost sentence. Intelligible enough to not be random words but odd enough to read like a trigger phrase for something.

The closest I can describe it as is like the string Zemo used to wake up the Winter Soldier, but with some syntax to it. Like "many thermos wiggle throughout exotic harbinger of circle ascending fuchsia entrapment".

Initially I thought nothing of it, but then I kept seeing them in these magic trick video comment sections. They're never the same string, and it's always under magic trick videos. from different channels even.

Hmmm.

The profiles that posted these comments are also always blank accounts with zero videos and no profile pic. Just their name. I felt like it was too much of a coincidence for these comments to only be under magic trick videos.

I also knew that the world of performance magic is thick with secrets. That is to say, there is deliberate obfuscation of information whenever you try to go online to find out how a trick works.

Magicians get together online and share information with each other just like performers of every other sort as well but the amount of code and doublespeak they use is an order of magnitude more annoying to decipher compared to say, an engineering message board or a gamedev forum.

Knowing that, I thought maybe this almost parsable gibberish I keep seeing everywhere was also some kind of code these people were using to talk to each other.

So I started investigating.

First things first, let's just Google one of the phrases. Maybe that's enough?

And it sorta was.

Pasting them onto the search bar lent me to only 1 result (wild!) and it was a website that looked really dank. Like geocities dank. Annoying neon colours and badly margined jpegs of tarot card images everywhere and a big bold header text that said something to the effect of:

"Congratulations, you've found our hidden message. This portal is only for those seeking knowledge beyond what is on the surface. Continue below."

* * *

I haven't been doing well. I feel like I say that too much. I say it on Patreon, on my personal podcast, whenever any of my friends ask me how I'm doing, pretty much everywhere. I feel very heavy. I understand I'm not the only one feeling like this during a pandemic.

Duh.

But I have this other version of worry that I can't quite articulate until right now: I'm scared I won't be funny anymore. Anwar and Farid can attest that even during our recordings I don't feel up to being funny. I question my jokes a lot. I barely enjoy telling them. I'm worried I'm letting everyone down.

To me, silliness and absurdism as virtues only make sense when the world has trace amounts of injustice and wrongness that training ourselves to see it in our everyday helps us remind ourselves of what is just and fair. The more we consume silliness, the more we are able to recognize silly and point it out. So we don't ignore it when things go wrong, so we talk about it, manage it. So we can take care of each other.

Maybe I can't be sure if we're all up for taking care of each other right now.

* * *

"Continue below" seems instructive, but it wasn't. Like I mentioned, the margins were haphazard and the CSS was all over the place. Some jpegs were straight up cropped off.

Meaning I can't be sure what "below" meant. But there were clickable images and text so I was readily intrigued.

It was tantalizing. Did I stumble into some secret order of Extremely Online Magicians? Maybe I'll finally find out why there aren't many female magicians out there. Maybe it's some sort of secret initiation to a secret message board full of secrety secrets. Secretly.

Y'all.

I didn't click on any of the linked images or anything. I closed the tab. That was the end of that.

An earlier version of myself would gladly run headlong into this rabbit hole to find out more and sink hours into some goddessforsaken labyrinth of links. But the current version of me recognizes this for what it almost certainly is: an abandoned roleplaying game.

Back in the early 00s when the internet was the realm of nerds and nerds only, it was full of people who loved sharing things for sharing's sake. It used to be punk rock to maintain a blog that only talked about snails or have a lo-fi YouTube channel that uploads biweekly 3-minute news about your house, or manage a little message board where people roleplay as wizards who rummage around the net looking for clues.

That last part was a thing I remember being actively involved in. In '03, a group of online friends and I wrote up a scavenger hunt of sorts where we sent people through various blog pages that we have where the goal is to just dick around and have fun. We wasted each other's time for sure. Hundreds of hours of it for literally no gain at all but for some laughs and fun memories.

The internet isn't like that anymore. People don't share something online for sharing anymore. Not really. There's this idea that if you put stuff out there, you want people's attention because numbers are good. You get a lotta reblogs and RTs and Likes which means people Like you.

If you don't have a lotta numbers, you don't matter. If you do, everyone has to talk about what you said or did because it's 'News' now.

Isn't that kinda gross, you think? That we need people to interact through an app to be sure that we're Liked? I say "we" but I mean me. I've successfully poisoned my brain to believe this to a certain extent too and it's not good.

I felt myself physically react when I closed that geocities magician website tab. I shuddered because my brain went from "this is cool" to "I gotta let people know I found this" to "this'll get me hella RTs" to "ew Muz why did you think that" within 3 seconds and I was disgusted with myself.

As a dude who started my online presence on YouTube and parlayed it into my real life comedy/writing career, I've believed for a long time that doing good work and putting it out there is what it takes for a working creative to make it because that's what I did. So there's this idea that making stuff and having it be seen is some kind of virtuous.

But it's not anymore. People pick fights with children for clout. Newspapers post about people's tweets as if its important. People are investing in crypto, a thing that literally only exists as electrical waste on a grand scale. We're boiling the oceans to yell at each other over nothing and exchange bits of code everyone agrees has ever-rising value but doesn't. Everyone is making and eating junk, it feels like.

So am I making junk? Have I just been making useless junk for literally over a decade now? Is that what I've been good for this entire time?

* * *

So the email.

It was a response from a company I applied to for a job. I applied as a creative writer and they're an advertising agency.

Receiving emails from a prospective employer when you're in need of a job is exciting! So soon after I applied, too. Wonderful. Here's what it said:

We just received your application today but would love to extend the opportunity for you to participate in the Case Competition as a prerequisite of your job application for Creative Writer position with [REDACTED] and stand a chance to be a winner for cash awards up to a total worth of RM1,800.

Yea.

They want me to enter a competition where I compete with other candidates to get a chance of being hired.

This company saw how many people applied for a job with them, and decided to dangle some cash and throw it over the fence to see which candidate will fight for it the most.

I didn't expect to feel vomitous after reading an email but that did it. I almost dry heaved. That's where we are now.

Recruiters see a glut of applicants and decided to play Fall Guys. These people watch Istana Takeshi and think Takeshi is the good guy. It hurts. It hurt me. That email caused me pain.

I can't at all empathise with recruiters who think this was okay to do. They really believed that creative writers will do a little dance for them just for money.

Look, I know we all need to eat. But I can also hate that people undervalue the work of creatives to this painful extent.

I don't give a shit about earning a lot of dough. I just wanna make things that tickle people. I want you to smile more.

That's the whole point of that weird little YouTube comment that led to the quirky website. That's the whole idea of making silly videos and dumb tweets and memes. We just want you to laugh.

But it seems people think so little of joy that they'll do whatever they can to avoid legitimately supporting and paying for stuff that gets them through the day. So much so that they want free work from us for the potential of maybe being able to get paid for more work. It breaks me, man.

I hate that I cannot make a living just trying my best to make people happy.

That's the best way I know to take care of you.

I know I don't just 'make junk' for a living. People have messaged me personally that my work has helped them get through tough times in school, in their relationships, at the office and I am eternally grateful that they took the time to tell me that.

I just also wish my feelings about my work aren't easily brought down by the majority of people who insist its worthless. Even if sometimes those people is me.

So forgive me if I won't be funny for a while. I'm gonna need some time to process this. Thank you for reading. I love you.

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ts1989fanatic · 6 years

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Kelsea Ballerini's Instagram About Taylor Swift Shows Their Friendship Is Serious Goals

Ain't no squad like a Taylor Swift squad, y'all. And for those of you follow Swift's posse pretty closely, you'll know that country singer Kelsea Ballerini plays a massive part of it. It's clear that Swift and Ballerini are the ultimate #squadgoals — the two iconic singers have shared their overwhelming success with each other, and I find that pretty damn awesome. And now, the world recently got to see Kelsea Ballerini's Instagram about Taylor Swift, and it will make you want to text your best friend ASAP.

On Tuesday, May 8, Ballerini took to Instagram to show her love for her BFF Taylor Swift, letting her know that she's beyond excited for her to start her Reputation tour and to let fans know that our girl Tay-Tay is just as amazing on stage as she is off of it. She wrote,

Happy tour kickoff to my friend that is equally as inviting, warm, and entertaining drinking wine on the couch as she is on stage. That being said, I can’t wait to come fangirl and get inspired. Potentially with a sign. Potentially also with some kind of snake apparel. Go get em, sister.

Yas, girl! So sweet. But what's even sweeter is the photo that was alongside her caption. It showed two gorgeous gals (aka Taylor and Kelsea) in matching apparel (I *feel* like they are bath towels, but I'm not going to assume), just chilling and drinking wine, much like almost all BFF's do:

Also, I'm really feeling this couch, so if either Taylor or Kelsea's team can reach out to me with the deets on that, it would be much appreciated. But, I digress.

Swift then commented on the photo, writing,

It's so weird that people say we're similar, I don't see it at ALL. love you kel kel

How cute?!

I just find it so sweet that Ballerini is so supportive of her good friend, and just wants to see her crush life (which, let's be honest, we all know she's doing).

In an interview with Elite Daily, Ballerini talked about how Taylor Swift played a "massive part" in her rise to fame. She said,

She tweeted about my EP before my first single was even Top 40. When people compare us, I hope that it’s because she’s always kept songwriting and her fans at the forefront. And that’s always something that I hope to take from her and what she does.

Speaking on behalf of everyone when I say that the comparison is only because the two are literally just all-around incredible singers and songwriters.

Pure royalty, the both of ya.

And, in a previous interview with Elite Daily, Ballerini also talked about what it was like to share a stage with Taylor Swift during her 1989 Tour.

"Taylor Swift was one of my earliest inspirations, one of the reasons I wanted to be a singer-songwriter," Ballerini said. "And I have pictures where I waited in line to meet her... Getting to sing with her on her tour in the arena where I grew up seeing her shows, and singing my song, which had just gone number one at the time... it was one of those moments where — I still don't even think I've really processed it. And then after that, we became really good friends, and that was even more special."

Imagine meeting someone you worshipped when you were younger, only to grow up and perform with that person? AND THEN YOU BECAME FRIENDS WITH THAT PERSON?!

For once, I just want to live in a world where something like this happens to me.

So, for all you Swift and Ballerini fans out there, just know that these two ladies are pure and loving and perfect BFF's. And I can't wait to see Ballerini holding up an "I love Taylor Swift" sign on her tour with some snake apparel on, because that's the true meaning of friendship.

ts1989fanatic It’s nice to read an article that does not contain SNARK about a Taylor Swift friendship.

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suzanneshannon · 4 years

Text

Thank You (2019 Edition)

One of our yearly traditions here is to thank all y'all CSS-Tricks readers at the passing of a new year. It means a lot to me that people come here and read the words I write, and the words of all our staff and guest authors that contribute here as well.

Thank you!

Plus, we dig into the numbers this time of year. I've always tried to be open about the analytics on this site. Looking at them year after year always serves up a good reminder: niche blogging is a slow game. There's no hockey-stick growth around here. Never has been, never will be. The trick is to build slowly over time, taking care of the site, investing in it, working hard, and with some luck, numbers trend upward. This year, overall traffic didn't even do that. Sometimes you gotta fight for what you've got! Growth came in other areas though. Let's take a gander.

It was January 1st, 2019 that the current design of this site (v17) debuted, so this entire year overlaps perfectly with that. I'll certainly be tempted to release major iterations with that same timing in the future for comparison sake.

Overall numbers

Google Analytics is showing me 90.3 million pageviews, which is a bit of a decline from 2018 at over 91 million. A 1% decline. Not a big problem, but of course I'd way rather see a 1% increase instead. We'll take that as a kick in the butt to produce a stronger year of content to hopefully more than win it back.

Looks like we published 726 articles over the year, which includes link posts and sponsored links. A good leap from 636 last year and 595 the year before that. Clearly quantity isn't the trick to traffic for us.

I don't know that we'll slow down necessarily. I like the fact that we're publishing multiple times a day with noteworthy links because I like to think of us as a timely industry publication that you can read like a daily or weekly newspaper in addition to being an evergreen reference. I don't think we'll invest in increasing volume, though. Quality moves the needle far more than quantity for this gang.

There is a bunch of numbers I just don't feel like looking at this year. We've traditionally done stuff like what countries people are from, what browsers they use (Chrome-dominant), mobile usage (weirdly low), and things like that. This year, I just don't care. This is a website. It's for everyone in the world that cares to read it, in whatever country they are in and whatever browser they want to. We still track those numbers (because Google Analytics automatically does), so we can visit them again in the future and look historically if it gets interesting again. Taking a quick peak, however, it's not much different than any other year.

Performance numbers are always fascinating. Google Analytics tells me the average page load time is 5.32s. On my fast home internet (even faster at the office), the homepage loads for me in 970ms, but it's more like 30 seconds when throttled to "Slow 3G." "Fast 3G" is 8 seconds. Sorta makes sense that most visitors are on faster-than-3G connections since the traffic is largely skewed toward desktop. No cache, we're talking 54 requests (including ads) and 770KB (fits on a floppy). It's good enough that I'm not itching to dig into a performance sprint.

Top posts of the year

You'd think we would do a section like this ever year, but because of our URL structure, I haven't had easy access to figure this out. Fortunately, in March 2019, Jacob Worsøe helped us add some Custom Dimensions to our Google Analytics so we can track things like author and year with each pageview.

That means we can find things, like the most popular articles written in 2019, rather than just the most popular articles looked at in 2019 — regardless of when they were was written. Here's a graph Jacob sent:

Here's that list in text:

The Great Divide

Change Color of SVG on Hover

New ES2018 Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know

An Introduction to Web Components

Where Do You Learn HTML & CSS in 2019?

The Many Ways to Change an SVG Fill on Hover (and When to Use Them)

Look Ma, No Media Queries! Responsive Layouts Using CSS Grid

How to Section Your HTML

Prevent Page Scrolling When a Modal is Open

CSS Animation Libraries

8.25% of traffic came from articles written this year. If you look at where these articles fall on the list of all URLs in 2019 (not just those published in 2019), the top article starts at #75! Hard to compete with older articles that have had time to gather SEO steam. This kind of thing makes me want to get re-focused on referential content even more.

Interesting that our top article was editorial, but everything else is referential. I like a little editorial here and there, but clearly our bread and butter is how-to technical stuff.

There are two aspects of search that are interesting to me:

What do people search for right here on the site itself?

What search terms do people use on Google to find this site?

On-site search is handled by Jetpack's Elasticsearch feature, which I'm still quite liking (they are a sponsor, but it's very true). This also means we can track its usage pretty easily using the analytics on my WordPress.com dashboard. I also installed a Search Meter plugin to track search form entries. I can look at Google searches through the SiteKit plugin, which pulls from Google Search Console.

Here are all three, with duplicates removed.

Jetpack Search Data Search Meter Search Data Google Search Data 1 amazon (?!) flexbox flexbox 2 flexbox grid css grid 3 css tricks flex css tricks 4 flexbox guide animation css important 5 css grid svg css triangle 6 css flex position mailto link 7 grid guide css grid vertical align css 8 css important css css comment 9 the great divide border css shapes 10 css shapes background css background image opacity

There is a bit of a fat head of traffic here with our top 10 pages doing about 10% of traffic, which syncs up with those big searches for stuff like flexbox and grid and people landing on our great guides. If you look at our top 100 pages, that goes out to about 38% of traffic, and articles past that are about 0.1% of traffic and go down from there. So I'd say our long tail is our most valuable asset. That mass of articles, videos, snippets, threads, etc. that make up 62% of all traffic.

Social media

It's always this time of year I realize how little social media does for our traffic and feel stupid for spending so much time on it. We pretty much only do Twitter and it accounts for 1% of the traffic to this site. We still have a Facebook page but it's largely neglected except for auto-posting our own article links to it. I find value in Twitter, through listening in on industry conversations and having fun, but I'm going to make a concerted effort to spend less time and energy on our outgoing social media work. If something is worth tweeting for us, it should be worth blogging; and if we blog it, it can be auto-tweeted.

But by way of numbers, we went from 380k followers on @css to 430k. Solid growth there, but the rate of growth is the same every year, to the point it's weirdly consistent.

I also picked up an Instagram account this year. Haven't done much there, but I still like it. For us, I think each post on Instagram can represent this little opportunity to clearly explain an idea, which could ultimately turn into a nice referential book or the like someday. A paultry 1,389 followers there.

Newsletter

I quite like our newsletter. It's this unique piece of writing that goes out each week and gives us a chance to say what we wanna say. It's often a conglomeration of things we've posted to the site, so it's an opportunity to stay caught up with the site, but even those internal links are posted with new commentary. Plus, we link out to other things that we may not mention on the site. And best of all, it typically has some fresh editorial that's unique to the newsletter. The bulk of it is done by Robin, but we all chip in.

All that to say: I think it's got a lot of potential and we're definitely going to keep at it.

We had the biggest leap in subscribership ever this year, starting the year at 40k subscribers and ending at 65k. That's 2.5× the biggest leap in year-over-year subscribers so far. I'd like to think that it's because it's a good newsletter, but also because it's integrated into the site much better this year than it ever has been.

Comments

Oh, bittersweet comments. The bad news is that I feel like they get a little worse every year. There is more spam. People get a little nastier. I'm always teetering on the edge of just shutting them off. But then someone posts something really nice or really helpful and I'm reminded that we're a community of developers and I love them again.

4,710 approved comments. Up quite a bit from 3,788 last year, but still down from 5,040 in 2017. Note that these are approved comments, and it's notable that this entire year we've been on a system of hand-approving all comments before they go out. Last year, I estimated about half of comments make it through that, and this year I'd estimate it at more like 30-40%. So, the straight-up number of comments isn't particularly interesting as it's subject to our attitude on approval. Next year, I plan to have us be more strict than we've ever been on only approving very high-quality comments.

I'm still waiting for WordPress to swoon me with a recommitment to making commenting good again. ;)

Forums

There were a couple of weeks just in December where I literally shut down the forums. They've been teetering on end-of-life for years. The problem is that I don't have time to tend to them myself, nor do I think it's worth paying someone to do so, at least not now. Brass tacks, they don't have any business value and I don't extract enough other value out of them to rationalize spending time on them.

If they just sat there and were happy little forums, I'd just leave them alone, but the problem is spam. It was mostly spam toward the end, which is incredibly tedious to clean up and requires extra human work.

I've kicked them back on for now because I was informed about a spam-blocking plugin that apparently can do incredible work specifically for bbPress spam. Worth a shot!

Interestingly, over the year, the forums generated 7m pageviews, which is 7.6% of all traffic to the site. Sorta makes sense as they are the bulk of the site URLs and they are user-generated threads. Long tail.

Goal review

✅ Polish this new design. Mixed feelings. But I moved the site to a private GitHub repo half-way through the year, and there have been 195 commits since then, so obviously work is getting done. I'll be leaving this design up all of 2020 and I'd like to make a more concerted effort at polish.

✅ Improve newsletter publishing and display. Nailed this one. In March, we moved authoring right here on the site using the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress. That means it's easier to write while being much easier to display nicely on this site. Feels great.

☯️ Raise the bar on quality. I'm not marking it as a goal entirely met because I'm not sure we changed all that much. There was no obvious jump upward in quality, but I think we do pretty good in general and would like to see us continue to hold steady there.

❌ Better guides. We didn't do all that much with guides. Part of the problem is that it's a little confusing. For one thing, we have "guides" (e.g. our guide to flexbox) which is obviously useful and doing well. Then there are "Guide Collections" (e.g. our Custom Properties Guide) which are like hand-picked and hand-ordered selections of articles. I'm not entirely sure how useful those hand-curated guides are, especially considering we also have tag pages which are more sortable. The dudes with the biggest are the hand-written articles-on-steroids types, so that's worth the most investment.

New goals

100k on email list. That would be a jump of 35k which is more than we've ever done. Ambitious. Part of this is that I'm tempted to try some stuff like paid advertising to grow it, so I can get a taste for that world. Didn't Twitter have a special card where people could subscribe right from a Tweet? Stuff like that.

Two guides. The blog-post-on-steroids kind. The flexbox one does great for us, traffic-wise, but I also really enjoy this kind of creative output. I'll be really sad if we can't at least get two really good ones done this year.

Have an obvious focus on how-to referential technical content. This is related to the last goal, but goes for everyday publishing. I wouldn't be mad if every darn article we published started with "How To."

Get on Gutenberg. The new WordPress block editor. This is our most ambitious goal. Or at least I think it is. It's the most unknown because I literally don't know what issues we're going to face when turning it on for more than a decade's worth of content that's been authored in the classic editor. I don't think it's going to hurt anything. It's more a matter of making sure:

authoring posts has all the same functionality and conveniences as we have now,

editing old posts doesn't require any manual conversion work, and

it feels worth doing.

But I haven't even tried yet, so it's a don't-know-what-I-don't-know situation.

Again, thanks so much!

I was thinking about how stage musicians do that thing where they thank their fans almost unfailingly. Across any genre. Even if they say hardly anything into a microphone during the performance, they will at least thank people for coming, if not absolutely gush appreciation at the crowd. It's cliché, but it's not disingenuous. I can imagine it's genuinely touching to look out across a room of people that all choose to spend a slice of their lives listening to you do your thing.

I feel that way here. I can't see you as easily as looking out over a room, but I feel it in the comments you post, the emails you send, the tweets you tagged us in, and all that. You're spending some of your life with us and that makes me feel incredibly grateful. Cheers.

🍻

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