It's back! We counted up all the hearts given to every Pen created in 2021 and created a list of the top 100. Marie and Chris chat about this year's list. Who's on it, what's on it, and digging into the numbers where we can.

Remember that people can heart pens up to 3 times each, so if it looks like a Pen lower down the list has more hearts than one higher up the list, it's because of the density of hearts. The number you see on the card only reflects the number of people that have hearted not the true number of hearts.

Lots of folks hitting multiple times. George Francis hit 6(!) times (7, 28, 59, 75, 80, 82), an impressive feat for a member who only joined in late 2020. Four people with four placements: Aysenur Turk (3, 11, 14... and 🥁 1), Yoav Kadosh (17, 33, 72, 95), Dilum Sanjaya (22, 24, 64, 65), and Aybüke Ceylan (38, 46, 63, 91), and a couple of 2-position people. Woot!

"Full page" layouts were quite a trend on the Top 100 this year. That is, Pens that look like complete websites with widgets and cards and navigation and sidebars and the whole nine yards. That's opposed to some past years where more minimal small-yet-surprising Pens were more dominant in the Top 100.

Advice for those shooting for the top? Talk about your work. Almost nobody on the list creates work and then never shares it. Share it on social media, blog about it, make a video, re-promote it multiple times. Be part of the community by liking other people's work. Remember, your hearts come from other CodePen members. Also, feel free to update and revise your Pens. Many of the Top 100 are updated and improved even after their initial wave of popularity.

Did you Netlify offers auth? They call it Netlify Identity. Why would you need auth on a static site? Well, a static site can also by quite dynamic, that's the nature of Jamstack. Say you're building a TODO app. No problem! You can have users sign up and log in. You can store their data in a cloud database. You can pull the data for that user from the database based on information about the logged-in user because of Netlify Identity.