Friends! Browser bugs! Sentient DOM nodes and key-value pairs!
It’s Robin here and you might notice a few unfamiliar things with this newsletter. Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since the last entry too but there’s a good reason for all these changes I promise. In fact, I come bearing great news through the wires, over the mountains, and across the seven seas: I made a good ol’ fashioned blog for The Cascade!
Behold: https://csscade.com
Making a new blog in 2024 about front-end development might seem a little daft at first though. Haven’t we all moved onto Discord or some enormous 30,000 person Slack channel by now? Aren’t we transcribing our thoughts directly into clouds in the sky and reading our most private thoughts through interfaces that are projected onto our hands already?
Who needs a blog in 2024?
Well, I do! I think that for a while we just got distracted by the allure of social networks and third party platforms and the razzle-dazzle of feeds. Deep down we all know these things aren’t much better and through that time blogs have always been the best way to keep up with a topic you care about. So now this little website will carry on that tradition of caring intensely about a single thing every day.
The Cascade is going to be a great way to keep you up to date with all the latest goings-on with CSS and web design, all the drama of different frameworks and techniques and hacks as they come in. I’ll also be linking to folks much smarter than me and writing big deep dives into new and old CSS properties that furrow my brow.
It’s going be a lot of fun writing about CSS again!
The other neat thing about this new version of The Cascade is that it’s entirely member supported. That means: no ads and no junk. Just pure, unadulterated ramblings about CSS and so I wrote a little bit about why I’m starting a membership program and why it’s a good idea:
The relationship is between you and me with a membership program and I like how up front that is. Plus, I’m going to be spending all my time thinking about how to make The Cascade better instead of doing devious and evil 2024 website things.
When you buy a yearly membership for $10 you help me cover the marginal costs of maintaining this website, sure, but becoming a member is really about trusting me to try out this weird thing and seeing if it works. When you do that you’re also asking for more things like this to exist in the world and I think that’s kinda neat.
If you’ve enjoyed these newsletters up until now then I’d appreciate any support but if you’re not sold yet then that’s okay! I think a membership program is about playing the long game and earning trust from readers very slowly over time. In fact, I don’t even have any analytics set up for the website because I think it’ll ultimately be a distraction from the work and getting folks to support it. Isn’t that secretly, quietly punk as hell?
You can follow each post as it comes in via the absolute wonder of RSS or via @csscade on Mastodon.
From here on out these newsletters will cover everything that happened over the blog that week but will go into a bit more depth. But, of course, any feedback here is extremely welcome!
See you in the cascade, etc. etc.
✌️ Robin