Marie and Chris talk about CodePen Challenges. We’ve been at it for many years! We get into the technology behind it, how we build our own CMS for it that powers the website and the emails that get sent about it. We also cover why they can be so beneficial for everyone involved. Time Jumps

Rach and Chris jump on the podcast to talk about the brand-new in-app notification system we built and shipped. We’re actively trying to balance a system that isn’t annoying, but allows us to show targetting information to targetted users when we think that’s valuable for both you and us. It started with “We launched 2.0!” […]

Very cool that random() in CSS is coming to Chrome to join Safari who led that feature. It means one of my favorite demos I’ve made when I was first playing with it will work for more people. I just like how little code it is and how it combines some fun modern CSS features. […]

Normal text wrapping can leave big gaps in your container, which can become even more exaggerated with the new-ish CSS values of text-wrap: balance and text-wrap: pretty. You almost certainly want to use balance or pretty because they do a great job preventing “dangling” lines in your text, even with icons. But what can we […]

Stephen just implemented a great UI feature for the 2.0 editor where all the Panels that were previously stuck to the left side of the page can now be dragged away to become an “Editor Tab” just like a file (or Block!). Now you’ve got a lot more freedom for what you’re looking at, and […]

I got a cool trick for you. You can just paste an HTML email into Gmail. So let’s say you’re using (the very nice) MJML language to create an nice responsive cross-client-compatible email on CodePen. Like this one. You can just select all that nice visual output and Copy it. Then in Gmail, make a […]

Chris has Jacob Miller on the show, who is building a tool called DiffUI. The big idea is that it uses a diffusion model to do prompt-to-website design rather than an LLM, because image-based models are more interesting and creative. So stay there for a while, producing really detailed visual mockups and plans, then head […]

Sometimes we gotta take matters into our own hands, am I right? I was reading Aaron Gustafson’s Never Lose Form Progress Again which is just a wonderful idea for a Web Component. Basically you wrap a <form> in <form-saver> and it saves the data a person types into a form to localStorage so they don’t […]

Stephen and Chris hop on to talk about the couple of weeks post 2.0 launch. Things are certainly different in 2.0! Literally the location of certain buttons is in a new place, and that requires folks to poke around a bit and figure it out. Some people just do that and it’s a non-issue. Some […]

There was a fun little debate about color themes and UI/UX. There is some solid logic to having three states for a color theme toggle: Meaning: That’s what we have in the 2.0 editor. Lea Verou presents a full-throated argument that color theme toggles should be two-state, not three-state. If you switch to the opposite, […]