Chris Coyier, founder of CSS-Tricks, writes about CSS, web development, advertising, SEO, and the business of the web.
HN links it for CSS techniques like auto-expanding textareas and for his posts on the web's future and MDN adding ads.
>I've been wrecking my brain how to make $10 on anything online
If you are really serious about $10 (and not some other larger number), here are some tips:
* Pick a topic you know really well (programming, cooking, sea diving, whatever)
* Make an infographic (get started on the topic of your choice, some specific and useful practical tip, etc) - picking a template from free tier Canva will go a long way in producing a good looking graphical post (you can even do animations)
* Put this up under pay-what-you-want model on sites like Gumroad (so, minimum price free but users can pay if they wish) - see https://mathspp.gumroad.com/l/cheatsheet_list_comps_101 for an example
* Post a sample on sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc (just the nice looking graphic, add a link to Gumroad later in comments if the posts start getting attention)
* Make a video to show demos (if applicable)
* Be consistent! Give it your best shot for topics you are really confident about. Listen to feedback. Learn and Build in Public for better reach (see https://swyx.io/learn-in-public and https://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/)
If you want an example for someone making a living by doing things like this, check out Julia's https://wizardzines.com/
Post-acquisition the Digital Ocean ran it for a little while with the same staff, then they let a whole bunch of people go (both digital ocean and css-tricks staff).
The css-tricks website was basically dormant for a few years.
Chris (the original creator of css-tricks) sick of seeing his creation stagnate tried to get Digital Ocean to get the website going again but it looked like Digital Ocean didn't know enough about the site to resume posting.
At some point the website's editor (Geoff) who had been let go as part of the layoff came back to work on the website and their was much rejoicing.
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You can read more about it here: https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-css-tricks-thing/
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CSS-trick's content had a bit rocky at the start of its comeback, but it's feels much better now than it did when it first resumed.
The vibe is a little bit different now, but I think that's because so many webdev writers are experimenting and writing in the open on mastodon before posting on their own blogs and larger platforms like css-tricks.
We didn't get as much of a peak behind the curtain before.
looks like css nesting is really coming! "Chromium as of 109.0.5394.0 is updated with the new syntax."[0]
the syntax has been finalized to allow an implied "&" so that it matches scss more closely than the initially selected syntax, to avoid copy-and-paste errors when moving from scss to plain css with nesting.
found this via "A Brief and Probably Only Partially Correct History of CSS Nesting"[1]
[0]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7834#issuecomment-1298270970
[1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2022/11/09/a-brief-and-probably-only-partially-correct-history-of-css-nesting/
It's a font that morphes the text fragment "am-" into the curly dash using a ligature.
https://chriscoyier.net/2025/05/10/the-am-dash/
But that won't help for long. If the Amdash becomes popular, then AI will pick it up, because "am-" is just a text fragment and AI can learn to produce it.
Even worse if a future version of Unicode adopts the Amdash, then nothing will stop AI.
Or the opposite happens as one already said here: Nobody will use the Amdash.
The technique for "Make a textarea auto-expand" is obsoleted by a new CSS property("form-sizing"):
https://chriscoyier.net/2023/09/29/css-solves-auto-expanding-textareas-probably-eventually/
Even without using this new CSS property, the technique that is used (adjusting the "height" of the element) is not ideal and can be glitchy.
A better approach is to use a mirror hidden element:
https://css-tricks.com/the-cleanest-trick-for-autogrowing-textareas/
Regarding Chris Coyier's initial post "What does it look like for the web to lose" [1] and his conclusion "Let's ditch the idea of native apps. All web! All web! All web!" I've got to say, that's exactly how it looks like for the web to lose. By the web trailing the capabilities of native apps rather than innovating in what made the web uniquely successful.
[1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-for-the-web-to-lose/