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I released a new article on Monday called Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids. As always, I’ve been watching its progress around the internet community very closely. Having done this a few times now I’ve noticed a very distinct pattern to the spread emerging.

Once the article was up on Content with Style I emailed a few people: css-d, 456 Berea Street, CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and a few others. No spamming, just a few personal emails to folk I genuinely thought would be interested in the subject. As it turns out, most of them were interested. Both Roger Johanssen and Alex Giron linked it up immediately and that’s when the fun started.

I kept an eye on the log files over the following couple of days… ALL the links in the first day were from CSS Beauty and 456 Berea Street, and that really is a testament to the following those sites have earned themselves. Even though the article only got linked from the side notes of each, the traffic was phenominal. Off the back of those two links Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids made it onto the del.icio.us Most Popular list, which, as I’ve seen before, proved to be the tipping point.

From the moment the article made that list, the traffic shifted. The Most Popular list feeds on itself - the higher up the list you are the more people see your article and the more people bookmark it. And on and on.

Over the last day the traffic has calmed down and the inbound traffic has diffused - now coming from personal blogs and forums. Some of these sites are far less subject-specific than the original sources.

This is only a very small example but it illustrates perfectly the idea of ‘thought leaders’ and ‘points of infulence’. PR and marketing people will already be well aware of this concept but though I have come across the idea many times I’d never really thought about it in a practical way.

This feels like a real democratisation of information to me. If your content is useful and/or interesting then it can gather a large audience very quickly with a little help from these ‘thought leaders’.

I’m told that this is how many Sun press releases are put out these days. The head of communications sends out an email to a handful of journalist acquanitances and if they are interested, they spread the word.

Communications departments should be paying attention…

I know I’ve been quiet for a while but this is why: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps. It’s been a couple of weeks in the writing and researching but I’m hoping it’s going to be popular. I don’t really know how to release this one though. For my CSS articles I knew that CSS-D is the place to go. This new one coveres usability, AJAX, javascript and maybe general web development… I guess I’ll just have to leave it and see what happens.

Wow, the first days in the life of Content with Style have been quite something. We’d been working on it on and off for almost 6 months and we didn’t really know what to expect. We figured we might get a few hits and, if we were lucky, we might get a bit of a snowball perhaps culminating in a few hundred visits. I’ve just been out for drinks with Pascal and Matthias, the other CwS writers, and they pointed me to the stats for this week. Now, bear in mind that we only launched on Thursday of last week… On Tuesday 24th May we served 5029 unique visitors and 23136 pages!!! Crikey! I’m absolutely awestruck.

My CSS Framework article seems to be getting a lot of attention… I’d hoped it would be popular but I’m delighted at the extent of the interest. I know at least a few other people had already reached the same conclusions as me but just didn’t feel the need to write them up. All I can say is that I’m dead chuffed people are finding it useful.

One of the things I’m enjoying most about the new site is the comments. I’ve been posting here for a while and I’ve never got around to adding a comment system. The participation on CwS is fantastic. I’m really disappointed that I’ve missed out on the community aspect of blogging up until now… I’m hoping to remedy that soon.

I’ve been very quiet of late and here’s the reason. I’m pleased to announce the launch of Content with Style, finally. It’s been an awful long time coming but we’re finally decided that it’s more important to get the site out there than to sit on it until it’s perfect or we lose interest. So, it’s a bit rough around the edges but we’ll improve and polish it as we go on. It’s our first go with Textpattern too, so some things aren’t quite as we might have liked, probably due to not knowing where to find plugins etc.

Content with Style is intended as a resource for accomplished developers. There won’t be too many beginners articles; we’re aiming more at developers who already know at least a little, if not a lot. For some reason there just don’t seem to be many articles out there for people of that level.

I’ve written two articles for the launch: Modular CSS and A CSS Framework. Both aim to highlight alternative ways of using CSS. I’ve been doing the rounds of web agencies for a couple of years now and all of them could benefit from these techniques. I’m new to writing though, so any feedback is much appreciated.

On a similar note, I’ve started porting DNR over to Symphony and I’m very impressed so far. There are supposed to be big things in the pipeline for the next release candidate. Watch this space.