CSS Wizardry Newsletter

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

I’m gonna level with you: I never really understood the point of people having newsletters. For things—like CSS, JS, or performance—sure, but people having them… it just never made sense to me.

That was until I spoke to David and Sagi at Hacking UI. I was on the Hacking UI podcast a few weeks ago and it was a tonne of fun. David and Sagi are really great guys and we had a very enjoyable chat about many, many different things, but one of my favourite parts was when they both passionately extolled the virtues of having a mailing list. I was sold, and added it to my to-do list.

Honestly, I would highly recommend listening to the episode, and keeping an eye on everything that the guys are up to. Some really insightful stuff going down.

The Newsletter

The newsletter will provide a place for sharing any content that doesn’t fit within the remit of a Tweet or a blog post. This means more curated and exclusive content; it means more off-topic and obscure; it means more personable and direct.

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Exclusive Content

I’ve always liked doing very low fidelity screencasts. A part of me really loves the idea of diving into a topic, throwing together a recording in one take, doing no editing, and just slinging it on YouTube for free. I want to do a lot more of these screencasts, and the newsletter will be a perfect way of sharing them. Screencasts will appear in the newsletter first, and then will probably hit Twitter a little while after.

I’ve already got a pretty neat performance screencast recorded for Issue #1.

Discounts

Events often give me promo codes to share with people. This usually gives attendees 10–25% off of their ticket price. The newsletter will be a good place for events to promote their, err, promotions, and for readers to get some bargains.

Updates

I was literally asked this five days ago: I really want to come to your performance workshop, do you have a mailing list so I can hear when you’re doing it next?

Well, I do now!

Curation

I’ll recap and reshare any of my own articles in the newsletter, so it will act, to some extent, as an RSS replacement. I will also occasionally dig into the archives and post older CSS Wizardry content (provided it’s still relevant).

I’ll also share links to other articles and resources I’ve found. These could be pretty off-topic, as I have a keen interest in the obscure. Anything that I’ve found particularly interesting recently would be a candidate for inclusion, so expect a lot of variety.

I’ll also share things like talks and technical blog posts that I’ve come across, so there will be plenty of technical stuff in there.

Frequency

I’m not going to stick to a strict publishing schedule because I want to be as informal as possible. I’ll share content as soon as I have something relevant to say, but I will also keenly avoid overloading you. Expect infrequency.

Sponsorship

For the longest time I have actively declined sponsored content requests on both this site and my Twitter account: I respect you way too much to start spamming you with ads. The newsletter, however, might be open to tasteful sponsorship, job listings, product pitches, etc. It’s an avenue I’m certainly open to exploring, but I’m keen to keep a close eye on relevance and quality.

If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote, get in touch with me to discuss options.

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N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.