This week on CodePen Radio, we’re discuss our brand new blogging feature.

  • 2:00 Why did we create the blogging feature? It was primarily because we watched how people used CodePen. What people were doing was taking their entire Pen and describing it, with text, inside the Pen.

  • 6:32 Embedded Pens make blog posts better, so we made it easy to embed Pens in a CodePen blog post.

  • 7:26 The difference between starting in a “green field” (no prior code to worry about) and a “swamp” (lots of code and things to consider before making any changes).

  • 8:46 Creating the blogging feature was even easier than green fielding, because we already had some of the pieces built and ready for blogging, both front-end and back-end. We were able to use a lot of the code we already had, and even improved some of the architecture, like the comments system.

  • 10:50 Good architecture decisions up front made our work easier down the road.

  • 12:58 Creating a blog post is very similar to creating a Pen, and it really showed us where we did a good job creating reusable code, Where we didn’t, and it gave us an opportunity to fix the code that wasn’t reusable.

  • 13:30 Since we had all this code written, we could have gone further and built more features, but we haven’t yet. Why not? And why did we create a feature most users hadn’t asked for?

  • 14:29 Why you should be thinking about your long term goals when your users are requesting features.

  • 16:29 Why self-imposed deadlines are important.

  • 18:14 Why we announced the feature after we launched it, and why Chris waited to write documentation and make the landing page.

  • 19:23 Why we created a separate landing page for announcing the feature.

  • 22:00 Why you should have a different tone for the landing page, the blog post, and the docs.

  • 24:04 How Editorially used different tones in different places when they announced that they were being acquired by Vox.

  • 25:58 The reaction to the blogging feature announcement.

  • 26:18 The more programmers that blog about the problems they encounter, the better. One of the unique things about blogging at CodePen is that you have the tools to create a coding example that works live.

  • 28:25 Is the CodePen blogging feature a strike against Tumblr or Medium? (hint: probably not, but we aren’t limiting anyone to writing about code at the moment)

  • 31:42 The benefits of the blogging feature for us, and how we’re monetizing it.

  • 32:57 The future of the feature belongs to you: tell us what you’d like to see!

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