CSS-Tricks, a publication known for tutorials and articles on CSS and front-end web development, has gone silent again. Its editor, Geoff Graham, posted on September 14, 2026 that he has published nothing since August 31 and that DigitalOcean has not assigned anyone to pick up the work. He said he "can't afford to work free for months on end" and has had to consider other options. Graham described the situation as "a steady deal" that collapsed into silence, not a sudden rupture.
The site's trajectory under DigitalOcean spans more than four years. Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks' founding editor, sold the publication to DigitalOcean in March 2022. He described the rationale at the time: DigitalOcean was a public company with resources, and its strategy appeared to be investing in developer-content communities as a top-of-funnel play. Coyier expected the site to improve — ads removed, Geoff kept on as lead editor, front-end coverage added to DigitalOcean's existing DevOps and back-end content.
That did not hold. In February 2023, DigitalOcean fired Graham and everyone else working on content and community. The last article published was a Passkeys overview, which Coyier described as a strange tombstone for the site. A consulting period followed, during which Coyier said DigitalOcean was interested in porting CSS-Tricks content to an internal static-site system — a conversion he doubted could preserve quality given how WordPress-dependent the site is.
DigitalOcean rehired Graham in June 2024, and the site resumed publishing. Now it is dark again. The vale.rocks micro post from September 15 attributes the silence to a lack of care rather than effort, noting that DigitalOcean pledged $3,000,000 to Omarchy — a set of scripts and configurations atop Arch Linux led by David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH — while ceasing the $50 monthly payments it had been making to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure. The post's author, who has written for CSS-Tricks, characterized the funding contrast as a question of priorities, writing that "CSS-Tricks being ignored isn't a matter of effort or time; it is a matter of care."
This visual identifies the vale.rocks micro post referenced in the article that contrasts DigitalOcean's $3M Omarchy funding against its cessation of CSS-Tricks support
Coyier said he tried to get CSS-Tricks back after the 2023 shutdown. A DigitalOcean VP of Content & Community, he wrote, was open to talking, but the economics were stark: rebuilding the editorial team, wrangling front-end-specific writers, and running a WordPress-heavy site would be expensive, with an unclear return. Coyier offered to run it himself, arguing he knew every inch of the publication and could restore traffic and writer momentum — but he did not want to do free consulting work, and he was unsure whether DigitalOcean would want him back.
Chris Coyier offers key insight into the technical and economic challenges of reviving CSS-Tricks under DigitalOcean's ownership, explaining why rebuilding the publication's WordPress-dependent infrastructure was financially untenable and why he cannot do free consulting work
What remains uncertain is whether DigitalOcean will reactivate the site, sell it, or let it remain as a dormant asset. Graham said he is "more hopeful than anything else" but that the silence is hard to process. CSS-Tricks is one of the few remaining quality publications focused specifically on the web; its loss would leave a gap that no current source fully fills.