This has recently been a fairly wild journey to watch from the outside.

Best of luck to Graham. I've got no idea how they'll make CSS-Tricks work as an indy blog in this era, but I hope they do make it work.

Nice! CSS-Tricks served me well over the years with whatever limited web-dev I did. I'm glad it's not actually shutting down. And if the author is reading this, I hope you can ignore all the nay-sayers. There are people who still want to actually know their tools instead of leasing their brain from Anthropic, and there's been a shortage of great teachers.

I remember learning the very basics of webdev from CSS Tricks. Years and years ago. They've been with me for my entire career and I am happy to see them independent again.

Similar digital publishing news:

https://press.asimov.com/articles/back

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/25/2026/rest-of-world-fac...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/the-ringer-bets-on-substac...

This reminds me of Indie Hackers decoupling from Stripe. The only difference is that IH went back to its original founders.

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/whats-new-indie-hackers-is...

As most others I’m also very doubtful of making this a worthwhile venture. I hope OP didn’t pay too much and makes this a chill project.

I see 2 additional paths:

1) I have no knowledge, but how does the let the crawlers pay work? Could a site like css-tricks with a lot of backlinks make money on that ? Or do LLMs have enough free content available

2) He could make this an anti-llm design website.

For a website about CSS it is ironic how awful it looks on mobile.

This is great news! I love CSS-Tricks and have bookmarked a lot of their articles over the years. We need reliable sources of learning material that isn’t just LLM-generated to make a quick buck. LLMs by their very nature cannot be trusted, even if they can be a great additional tool for learning.

Quality information is hard to come by these days and I admire everyone who take on the responsibility and cares enough to keep those sources available and healthy, even through uncertain times.

Previous discussion:

CSS-Tricks in Limbo | 273 points, 146 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708993

This is a refreshingly candid article and was an absolute breath of fresh air. Wishing all the best to the team.