CSS-Tricks sits idle again as DigitalOcean stays silent and funds Omarchy instead

CSS-Tricks sits idle once more

CSS-Tricks, one of the most widely read publications for front-end developers, has stopped publishing again, and its owner DigitalOcean has said nothing publicly about what happens next. The account comes from a blog post by a writer who has contributed to the publication, which reached the front page of Hacker News on 15 September and has renewed concern for the site's survival.

According to the author, the site is currently dormant: no new articles, no announced plans, and no meaningful response from DigitalOcean.

A recurring cycle of neglect

The publication, which Chris Coyier built into a fixture of the front-end community, was bought by DigitalOcean in 2022. It kept running under the cloud host's ownership until February 2023, when the company dismissed the people working on it. The site then sat untouched for roughly a year before DigitalOcean rehired lead editor Geoff Graham in June 2024, and output resumed.

That revival now appears to have ended. The author writes that the site has fallen inactive a second time and that the company has largely gone silent, leaving its future in doubt.

The post argues this is not a question of resources. DigitalOcean is a big company where things can be missed, especially amid staff turnover. The real issue, as the author frames it, is that nobody with the power to decide appears to care.

Money for Omarchy, silence for CSS-Tricks

What gives the situation its sting is a contrast the author draws with DigitalOcean's other spending. Days before the post, the company pledged $3 million to Omarchy, a bundle of scripts and configuration layered on top of Arch Linux and other open-source projects, led by David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and a figure the author criticizes harshly over his recent political profile.

Hansson himself described how quickly the arrangement came together: he contacted DigitalOcean chief executive Paddy Srinivasan on X on a Wednesday, the two spoke that same evening, he sent a proposal on Saturday, and the deal was settled by Sunday.

Meanwhile, according to the post, Geoff Graham had spent months trying to raise the situation at CSS-Tricks with the company and got nowhere. The author also reports that DigitalOcean stopped its previous monthly payments of $50 to GNOME and to Flathub's infrastructure, small sums for projects that software like Omarchy itself depends on.

The author, who notes having written for CSS-Tricks, says the frustration is less about money than about the state of the field: few quality publications about the web remain, and each one that fades leaves developers with fewer places to turn.

Why it matters

CSS-Tricks is more than a blog. Its archive of guides and reference material has long served as a first stop for front-end questions, and if the site is left to decay or eventually disappears, that accumulated work goes with it.

The episode also fits a familiar pattern in tech media: independent publications built up over many years get acquired, then quietly starved once they stop serving the owner's strategy. For now, the fate of one of the web's best-known resources rests with a company that, on this account, could assemble a $3 million donation in four days but has not managed a public sentence about the publication it owns.