Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host. That’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You’ll also find links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. Today, I am very happy to say that I have a friend of mine and an internet revolutionary. I don’t know, genius behind so much stuff. He’s the guy behind CodePen and CSS-Tricks before that, and just a generally awesome dude, Chris Coyier. Thank you so much for joining.

Chris Coyier: What up, Jesse? Good to be on your show. I like being called a revolutionary. That’s fun. I’ll take it. I don’t know if I am that. It just sounds cool.

Jesse Friedman: I don’t think people who are revolutionary necessarily call themselves that. But I feel like you’ve been at the forefront of a lot of tech, and you’re always pushing the limits and doing really cool things and helping us all build on the internet a lot better, a lot faster.

Chris Coyier: Well, thanks. Yeah, I’ve been doing the internet for a long time, as have you. Making the internet better too while we’re here, we might as well, ’cause it’s one of human beings’ greatest ideas, I think. That’s why we’re all so damn smart recently, you know? It’s ’cause we have the internet. You can just look stuff up. There’s no AI without the internet, I’ll tell you that much.

Jesse Friedman: You’re absolutely right.

Chris Coyier: Yeah, it’s gotta read every word ever written somewhere, and it’s at URLs. You know, I notice you read the URL for your podcast right at the beginning. Was it impressive.host? Killer TLD, top-level domain there. You can type that into a web browser and you’ll go right where you need to go. A URL is just the foundation of the web and just a fantastic thing we all have. And I bring that up not as a joke. It is a great idea, and the World Wide Web is where those things work. It’s behind all kinds of everything. I like that podcasts are that too. The way a podcast works is there’s a URL to an RSS feed, and that RSS feed has enclosures in it which point to audio files which also have URLs, and then your podcatcher visits that URL, downloads it, and then you listen to the audio or video or whatever’s in that enclosure. It’s just URLs all the way down, which is great, and not necessarily the way that all other platforms work. I just think it’s a big strength of the web that we should revel in sometimes. Not to make this philosophical all the time, but it’s a thing worth protecting and a thing at the foundation of all this. The beautiful URL.

Jesse Friedman: Oh, geez, Chris, you’re ringing my bell, man. This is exactly what I’m here to do, is to help people understand the value of the open web. We had a great episode a couple months ago where we had Porkbun on. They’re a registrar, and we talked a lot about domains. We talked about the value of owning your own real estate. The domain is your address on the internet. It’s your way to bring everybody to you. We talked a lot about how people don’t actually understand the value of domains these days, especially with social media, because you get instagram.whatever, right? But you could get a domain and point it to anything. You could even point it to your own Instagram page. I say this all the time because I want people to understand how they can own more of their influence. If you at least owned a domain and pointed your audience to that domain, even if it redirected to an Instagram page, at least then you’d have something for people to hold onto in case you ever got delisted or shadow-banned from Instagram.

Chris Coyier: Yeah, huge, right? When you own it, it’s a big deal. Nobody else can tell you what to do with it or how it’s handled. Yet anyway. Not trying to tempt you, government. Stay out of it. It’s kind of a “No, this is mine,” you know? Stay out of my stuff. I don’t like it when big platforms go away or have big sweeping institutional change. We’ve lived through it so many times. Remember when Twitter used to exist?

Jesse Friedman: I refuse to call it the single-letter name.

Chris Coyier: We used to put links in there, and people would click those links, and it was nice, and then it all went away. Anyway. I wish I got to talk to Porkbun. I’m gonna listen to your Porkbun episode. I think they’re one of the good ones. They do good work.

Jesse Friedman: Porkbun’s great.

Chris Coyier: Yeah. Buy domains. Connect them to websites, ’cause it gives you…

Jesse Friedman: Let’s talk about building websites. You’ve been building websites for a really long time. You’ve been helping others build websites for a really long time. For people who don’t know, what are you working on? What is CodePen? What do people at home need to know about CodePen?

Chris Coyier: Oh, that’s cool. We can talk about CodePen and my history of building websites. I really do like to lean into that. “What do you do, Dad?” “Oh, well, I help people build websites.” For a long time it was the CSS-Tricks days for me, which was of course a WordPress website, and Jetpack helped a lot with that. I think I knew you maybe even before the Jetpack days, but definitely during. Anyway, that was kind of like I got a kick out of design, making websites, what websites look like, what the user experience is, what the performance is like, because that can often be a hugely front-end part of the story. CSS-Tricks was kind of mostly a blog, I guess. That’s how people thought of it, and they would subscribe to it through its RSS feed. I would blog a lot. Sometimes many times a day, and then it became more and more people, and then I had Jeff running it as a publisher and site owner, just getting it done over there. Just an unbelievably large number of blog posts. Every one of them about let’s build websites good. That was the overall theme. Always about CSS, but always about websites generally. So that was cool. And then CodePen was born out of that. We do demos a lot on CSS-Tricks, so I ended up building this site called CodePen, which would help me embed demos into those blog posts. It’s grown up since those days, and people use it for all kinds of reasons. They may or may not ever use the ability to embed a pen. A pen is some HTML and some CSS and some JavaScript, and then you get to see the results of it. You don’t have to install anything. It all happens right in the browser. That’s kind of the point of it. One use case is teachers use it to show off stuff. You know, the first thing you ever learn in HTML, your teacher’s gonna be like, “Here’s an H1 tag. Look at these weird little angle brackets. You probably didn’t even know those existed on your keyboard, but here they are. We don’t use them in the mathematical way. We use them to wrap around what we call a tag, and then you write hello world, and then you have to close that tag. That’s called XML,” and so on. But you type that on CodePen, and all you’re looking at is that opening H1 tag, the closing H1 tag, some text in between it, and then right below it or to the side, however you have your screen laid out, you’re seeing the HTML turn into a visual output. I think that’s a big aha moment for people. They’re like, “Oh, these websites, they’re just code that a web browser reads, and it turns into a visual result.” It’s a cool moment to watch somebody go through. They’re like, “Oh, I get it.” And then you can layer up from that.

Jesse Friedman: You mentioned teachers. I gotta say, I used CodePen to help students myself, for real. Because you’re absolutely right. When you got into teaching HTML markup, you would have to have them load up a text file or an IDE, then save it, then tell them to open up their browser, and then they have to work here, then refresh here, keep going back and forth. And then when CodePen came on the scene, it was just in the browser. You’re able to see your HTML, your CSS, even JavaScript, and you can alter it in real time and see the output in real time.

Chris Coyier: See the results in real time. The big aha moment. Right, and then you’re like, “Well, but also I wanna use Sass or whatever, because that’s popular.” That would up the ante for that local setup you were describing even more, because now I need to NPM install some stuff and set up a little build process and all that. And we kind of benefited at a time where it’s like, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll do that stuff for you.” People would often do it just as a temporary thing. Like, I just need to make up something quick because I wanna talk about it with my team, or I’m interviewing somebody and I want them to do it. I wanna see how good they are. Or I have this amazing idea and I wanna share it with the world. They can do it there, and then they get the benefit of the social network, right? Because we’re tracking the views and the hearts and the comments and all that. The homepage of CodePen is not an editor. When you’re logged in, it’s like, look at all this cool stuff that people have made. So it’s kind of like a never-ending feed, like Facebook or whatever else.

Jesse Friedman: I always thought of CodePen as kind of like the Dribbble of code. You remember Dribbble?

Chris Coyier: Oh, I do. One of the founders of Dribbble came to work for us for a little while after they sold Dribbble. I was always like, “Oh, I wanna be successful like Dribbble.” It was an envy kind of thing. They were all design, right? Dribbble was, you post these little, at the time, 400 by 300 images. It really limited what you could post. You had to post these little tiny rectangles of stuff. And people loved it. It’s probably doing better now than it ever has, but now it just feels different. It’s all about hiring and jobs. But they did have a job board even back then, and if you needed to hire a designer, it was a great board for that. I think that ended up being like 80% of their profit as a company. And we tried to run a job board. Did nothing, you know? And I was like, if we could hit that but have it be the front-end developer market instead of the design market, that would be huge, and I just could never figure it out.

Jesse Friedman: I think the problem you have there is that Dribbble was a showcase of design elements, right? So it didn’t even matter what was behind it. It could just be a Photoshop file exported as a JPEG or something like that. So it was a lot easier for you to be like, “Oh, that’s sexy. I want that for my website,” or, “I want that for my brand. Let me hire that person who designed that.” Whereas with code, as a person who’s hiring, you may not understand, is that cool? Is that really awesome? Did they do a really elegant thing there or not?

Chris Coyier: Yeah, more so by a novice, yeah.

Jesse Friedman: By somebody who doesn’t necessarily know. It’s a lot easier to point at pixels and say, “Wow, that’s sexy.” But when it comes to code, it’s like, “Well, that looks cool, but I don’t know if that means anything better than the next thing.” I actually got my Dribbble invite from Jason Santa Maria back in the day. Back then Dribbble was exclusive. And Jason’s a cool guy. A lot of people don’t know this, but he actually designed the WordPress logo back in the day, the same one we still use today.

Chris Coyier: Wow. Actually impressive.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. I remember forever it was like you had to fight Google on it because for some reason there was a wrong one and a right one. I think it was the WP Faux or something like that. For some reason somebody was using the wrong one. I do remember it, and I think it still exists today. Like, it shows you the difference between the faux brand and the real brand.

Chris Coyier: Yeah, there’s a niceness to the Jason Santa Maria one apparently. I don’t have it locked in my head that he did that logo, but that sounds about right. Of course he did.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, actually I talked to him about it and he was so casual about it. I was like, “Dude, that logo is seen by 40% of the internet. Like, anytime somebody logs in they see it.” Millions and millions of people see that logo all the time.

Chris Coyier: They do. Tiny and small in the upper left of their screen, and sometimes they see it real big. That’s cool. A lot of these early types had big influence. I was thinking of one of the early Digg guys, not Kevin Rose, but his buddy Daniel something, who did the Firefox logo. That’s a claim to fame. The swooping Firefox logo.

Jesse Friedman: That’s very cool.

Chris Coyier: In the early days, your work goes a lot further. Anyway.

Jesse Friedman: I think it was a smaller world back then.

Chris Coyier: It was. In some ways, as a WordPress blog, CSS-Tricks got a comment section for free. I think that’s a legit reason to choose something like WordPress. You get this social part of the web kind of baked in from the early days. Even the stuff like pingbacks and all that made you part of the web. It was evidence that they cared about other websites too. It was like, let’s all be a part of a bigger thing. Which I loved. But in the smaller days, you’d get more comments in a smaller community, which is kind of weird to think about, but I think that ends up being true. There used to be tens, dozens, hundreds of comments on a blog post in my little niche of talking about websites on CSS-Tricks. And as the industry grew and the community around websites grew, comments actually went down. The bigger the community, the worse people behave almost. It’s weird.

Jesse Friedman: I think we’ve been on this negative trajectory around community conversations for a long time, right? Whether it’s politics or science or news or whatever it might be, there’s always somebody out there to antagonize or argue or fight. But you’re right, comments for a long time were so powerful because it was a very fast and inherently natural way within WordPress for you to connect with your visitors and your users. It was just right there, and you could have this immediate connection with them. Didn’t require logins or passwords, didn’t require active sessions. You didn’t have to create an account. You could just give an opinion or talk. And I think now there’s just so much negativity out there that people are a little bit more reluctant to leave a comment than they were in the past.

Chris Coyier: Yeah. But it feels that way. It feels like the political discord sucks, or Twitter’s a hellhole, or Reddit’s going to crap or whatever. But those tend to be really big communities. You probably have a local birding community that’s popping off. I’ve got an old-time music community that I’m a part of that’s very positive and everybody’s chit-chatting and doing great, ’cause they’re smaller. There’s probably some weird sociological rule that says the smaller a community, the healthier it is. Because there’s consequences. If there’s a bad actor in a small community, you really wanna be a birder in your Austin birding community, but you’re a dick, they just kick you out. They stop inviting you to the bird stuff, and then you’re bummed out. But you can’t get kicked off of Twitter. You can just be as horrible as you want, and it’s so big you don’t even remember people from things. There’s no consequence for poor actions in a big community.

Jesse Friedman: Actually a really great point. People carry this active social trauma with them everywhere they go. But I think blog owners and community owners could really push people to comment more, get involved more, and make it feel safer than those larger communities. You’re absolutely right about that. And there’s a lot about how WordPress got so successful that comes down to the active community and people being so welcoming and open, helping and supporting each other.

Chris Coyier: It definitely is. It’s amazing to me that it’s still going so well. You’re back from India from a WordCamp. That blows my mind. Changes certainly had to happen. WordCamps 15 years ago are not what they’re like anymore. It would’ve been easier for somebody to just say, “Ah, we just don’t do those anymore,” or not adapt with the time. But instead they did adapt, and they’re great.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, and the big flagship ones bring thousands of people together, but we still have hundreds of smaller ones all over the globe all the time, run by local people who are just passionate about what they wanna talk about.

Chris Coyier: Yeah. We used to have CodePen ones and they went really well. There was some good growth and I’d try to go to as many as I could. Then there were more and more, and I was like, “Oh, I can’t go to all these, so maybe we’ll just wish them good luck.” We had a swag package we would send them. But then we started to have expectations of what we expect from you as a host of one of them, and what you can tell people they could expect out of the meetup, instead of it just being like, “Use our name and do whatever you want.” That felt weird. But then I was like, we’re such a small company. I can’t even hire one person to manage all this, and it feels like at least a one-person job to manage. So we did have to spin them down, which is a little sad, but that’s just the nature of it. We can’t all be as big as WordPress.

Jesse Friedman: So what are you focusing on these days?

Chris Coyier: Well, CSS-Tricks is in other capable hands now. Jeff is still the lead editor over there, but he works for DigitalOcean, who bought it, which is great. That was on purpose for me, ’cause I got to step away and do other stuff. But it’s kind of because CodePen is growing and growing and growing. CodePen is only slightly newer than CSS-Tricks. We’re still over 15 years old as a company. And we’ve done nothing but grow since the beginning, which is nice, but we’ve never had a massive growth moment. It’s just a long, slow, steady climb, which kind of defines my career a little bit. It’s never been like, “We did it. We went super viral, and now everybody owns our socks,” or whatever. It’s always a long-term grind, but one that doesn’t feel awful. It’s like, yeah, I’m doing it ’cause I like doing it.

Jesse Friedman: Steady organic growth is actually something that a lot of people envy. You get this idea that the internet is gonna make you blow up, that social media is gonna explode, that you’re gonna get some influencer who’s gonna sell your product. But in reality, CodePen’s a little different than some hot sneaker that an influencer can peddle.

Chris Coyier: Right. Usually startups are looking for higher growth than what we’re doing, because the VC model was, give you a bunch of money at high risk, and it’s either gonna do great and we’re gonna 10X our output, or it’s just gonna fail. Then entrepreneurs would go off and do the next thing. Maybe that’s not just our era, maybe that’s just what entrepreneurialism is. But that never sat super well with me. I’m not as interested in the idea of enough growth, throw it in the trash can, try again. I’m like, “No, I don’t have infinite ideas. I like this idea. I’m doing this idea ’cause I like this idea.” I do want to make money. I make choices around profit. I like running profitable businesses, and I want there to be more profit. I’m very interested in that aspect of running a business. But it’s okay that I’m not a billionaire or whatever. It’s okay to me that it takes a while, that it’s a long burn, and you earn it along the way.

Jesse Friedman: I think it’s great that you’re working on something that, I mean, we both live in a world where we’re enabling people to have a voice, and I think that’s important. You’re helping people build websites. I’m helping people host websites. But at the end of the day, a website is an extension of who you are. It’s the ability for you to share your passions, talk about what you’re doing, sell your things, help people make a living. That is really powerful.

Chris Coyier: It is. There are so many archetypes for websites. It can be a podcast. It can be e-commerce or whatever. It can be a little game. My kid’s been vibe-coding little games. I’m like, “Oh, maybe I’ll make her a little URL to share her games.” I like that websites can be lots of different things. It doesn’t always have to be just your little slice of the web. It can be a big slice of the web if you want, or ultra tiny, or you could not share it with anybody, or it could be an archive of GIFs you’ve saved over the years. Anything. That’s part of the beauty of it to me. It can be anything. It’s multimedia. It can be words, it can be sounds, it can be video, it can be whatever. It can be 3D even.

Jesse Friedman: Have you seen websites where you put on 3D glasses?

Chris Coyier: Yeah, absolutely. Some of them are on CodePen. So yeah, I’m working on CodePen. I know I didn’t fully explain the whole thing, but it is just a code editor in the browser, and I want people to build more stuff with it. From a business perspective, we knew when people would leave. Leaving meaning like, you’d meet somebody at a conference and be like, “Oh, what’s up, dude?” “Yeah, I used to use your thing.” Not to make a casual, over-a-beer kind of thing too business-oriented, but eventually you’ll hear why. And I know why people leave CodePen. It’s like it’s not really a full-on place where developers build real stuff. You use it because you wanna talk about something, you’re building a little reduced test case to figure out a bug. You’re like, “Here’s my code. What’s wrong with it?” Or you’re showing off a small idea or one component. Or you’re teaching somebody early concepts. There are enough reasons that we run a whole business with employees and make money. But doesn’t it stand to reason that if you didn’t lose people, the business does better?

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Chris Coyier: So we’re building a new version of CodePen, and we’re calling it CodePen 2.0. I don’t think I’ve said that in this podcast yet. It’s out now in public beta. The idea is let’s support more technologies and support the idea of building more full-blown websites. You can’t run WordPress, but you can run a lot of other stuff and you could build a site. I’ve been doing it to show people little example sites. More like little brochure sites or a simple blog or whatever. Things that don’t require an auth system or comment section or things that need a database. You can’t do that yet, but what you can do expands what you could do on CodePen before. So maybe it doubles or triples or quadruples the reason you’d use it. And you’re also using it more like for real. You’re building something that people are really gonna see. People might not even know you built it on CodePen at all, because there’s just a deploy button. You hit the deploy button, you get a URL. We make up funny names, so you get something like rainbowbobcattail.codepen.app, and that’s what your site is. Some people are like, “Cool, thanks,” and they share it. That’s what my daughter does when she makes a game. She hits the deploy button, she’s got a URL she can send to her friends to play her game. She doesn’t care what the URL is. But a lot of people like you and me do care what our URL is. I wanna put it at something like mycoolwizardgame.chriscoyier.net or whatever. And so CodePen supports that too. You set a little DNS record and point it to us, and we’ll figure it out. We’ll provision an SSL certificate for you and host that website for you. And my co-founder just the other day was like, “Well, have you seen this?” And it was kind of a WordPress Labs thing where you can spin up a whole WordPress instance without needing SQL and PHP and stuff, because there’s this web technology called WASM that just bundles all that up and makes it all work as an executable that runs on the web, which is amazing.

Jesse Friedman: Wild, right?

Chris Coyier: Yeah. He knows I’ve been a WordPress guy forever. Even though I do CodePen, WordPress and CodePen have almost nothing to do with each other. But every other website I spin up in my life practically is a WordPress website, ’cause I know it well. It’s very powerful. I like it. The hosting story I understand and make good use of. And my co-founder Alex knows I’m kind of a WordPress guy, and I feel like he always brings up WordPress stuff. He’s like, “One of these days we’ll be able to host it,” and then maybe this is the answer for us in the end. We’ll see.

Jesse Friedman: That’s really interesting. I really wanna get into who you see as the typical or best-case scenario user for CodePen, but we’re running out of time here, so maybe we could wait and do that in the next episode. Let me ask you just a super quick question. Do you have AI integrated into CodePen right now? Like, is it a vibe-coding kind of situation?

Chris Coyier: Absolutely not. None at all. But that’s not necessarily a philosophical choice. I know that conversation is complicated. I actually have prototypes I’ve built myself, but we have not shipped any AI to customers yet. We use it behind the scenes, of course. We’ve long been detecting spam and things through machine-learning type models and stuff. But yeah, we don’t even have auto-complete or anything AI-related, which is kind of interesting. What’s worth saying publicly on a podcast is that it does make us a rather sweet data hive, because more and more AI models are interested in data that wasn’t AI-generated. Otherwise, they’re just eating their own poop, essentially.

Jesse Friedman: I need to cut that sound effect. That was brilliant. All right, we gotta take a break. We’ll be back with another episode. Chris, this is so awesome talking to you. We’ll be right back.

Chris Coyier: Sure.