This is awesome. Been a CodePen user/fan since it launched (and a fan of Chris/CSS-Tricks for even longer). Really nice to see CodePen evolving.

I don't use it as much as I used to but every so often I hack something up in it for a quick PoC. I'll say the new ability to deploy got my attention. Really handy to be able to deploy a prototype or demo of something and toss it over the fence.

I've been a CodePen user since the very early days. Have always loved the platform. I hate to be negative, but I'm honestly not a fan of the 2.0 release. What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I'm building a website inside of a website.

• gkoberger

  today at 7:16 PM

  That's the hard part about tools like this. They're too simple to be used for anything important, and as soon as the creator follows that path you end up in a situation where it's too simple for anything complex and too complex for anything simple.

  Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.

  (Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)

  • bodhi_mind

    today at 7:45 PM

    Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?

> every pen is deployable

It will be interesting seeing how this evolves. Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Still trying to solve it for my own stuff.

That said, I do wonder how valuable something like codepen is in the current meta. I really no longer look at code. I'm not referencing examples, I'm just prompting for what I want / inputting images as context.

• petercooper

  today at 7:01 PM

  Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point.

  Does it work? I'm a paid user, but set up a new free account to see if the deployment stuff worked there too (as I was linking to it from elsewhere) and it said I had to upgrade to a plan that supported it.

• threetonesun

  today at 7:23 PM

  Where do you think the AI is getting the code from your prompts from.

Used to love this site back when you could see what other craftsmen were actually creating by hand.

A CodePen api/protocol that supports a local ide opening a CodePen, making changes in the user's developer tooling and pushing back to the pen would be a game changer.

VCS extensions for jetbrains and vscode could hook into an api and smoothly pull and push pens. This feature was always my hangup for using CodePen as a UI playground.

If the owner reads this, I'd consider getting codepen.app registered as a public suffix [1].

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/

https://jsfiddle.net/ used to be also very popular, I see that it is still available, but haven't used it in a while.

Which other alternatives do people use now days?

• embedding-shape

  today at 7:13 PM

  https://jsbin.com is what I've used since forever, it's fast and easy, used to use JSFiddle before that. I think you used to be able to create "bins" without having to login way back though. Honestly don't find much use for them anymore nowadays, if I want to share any web/web-like I do it via my own servers + domain and send links to people.

CodePen is like an HTML/CSS/JS temple. Greate place to explore the limits of what native web offers.

any intersection with val.town use cases?

Always felt like the worst aspect of code pen was the exploratory side. Looking up codepens is extremely poor, you often only look up one "tag" and after the first page quality gets worse.

Wish it had an advanced search that I can filter codepens for something useful like this: animejs, svg, forms; with the result being codepens that use anime.js around a form.

I'd probably use codepen as the defacto web ui reference if it had better search capabilities. Right now it's mostly github + blogs, but only because it's so hard to find anything worthwhile on codepen. Gold is there but it's deep under the strata with no willing to actually get it.

• unleashit

  today at 8:39 PM

  This should be the top comment, especially since organic search has been lost. Not to be overly critical because Codepen was great in its time, but it's now on individual websites to upgrade their search game if they want to stay relevant and useful.

  Edit: Just noticed that logging in is now required for search. I'm sure this is an attempt to prevent AI scraping, etc., but it's a big mistake IMHO. While I have an account, I don't log in much and tend to abandon sites that require log in. Among nerds, I'm probably not the only one like this.

Whoah… CodePen… didn’t remember that… since the overflow of ai tools, this feels a bit like ancient tech. Used to love CodePen.