Category: Random

Building Landing Pages with AI

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

We had a special month at Automattic that ended last Friday. For a full month, we could form groups of two people and work on whatever we liked, as long as we are in a pair.

I chose 4 projects and ended up working on 3 of them, discarding the 4th – couldn’t get to it. First was the new Writing Prompts, which was relatively low-tech (on the surface) but pretty cool. Seeing people respond to blogging prompts that were my idea is melting my soul.

The second project was around building a way to assemble good looking landing pages with AI quickly.

A landing page on WordPress.com is a page that tells a story, highlights a feature, or shows something so it’s discoverable. For example, a colleague runs a program that gives paid plans to students. Another wants to show how WordPress.com compares to a competitor. They write content, the content is then designed, and then the design is turned to an actual page by an engineer.

Landing pages

My team is sometimes responsible for the implementation of these. I didn’t like this type of front-end work and avoided it. A few months ago, we were in a situation in which the demand for new landing pages was high, and the resources for implementing them low, so I was “shoot, if I have to make these, let’s at least offload as much possible to AI”. The first round resulted into something like a vibe-coding flow, the benefit of which was that the work moved from the WordPress editor to Claude Code. But it was still too technical, and required a design (usually in the shape of a Figma document).

My colleague Jordan Hiller came up with the idea to give sense to Claude Code by providing it with a library of pre-designed, ready to use, empty sections that can be filled with text and images, depending on the needs. The technology behind it is Gutenberg Block Patterns. They’ve been around for awhile and can also be used from the editor or the wp cli. However, we expect the usage through a Claude skill to be the primary way to use this work because it doesn’t require expertise when making more advanced tweaks.

It’s an internal tool project. Something to make our lives easier, replace an annoying process with a faster one. The faster process lets you maintain the pages better, update more frequently, apply best practices sooner. Essentially, do more and stay on top of the change requests or avoid them altogether by letting the person who requests the change do it on their own.

Is that going to result into anything you’ll notice? Probably not. But if we’ve done our job well, the new landing pages will be built and updated faster, will load faster, and the colleagues who come up with the content will take the control from engineering.

Is the Coca-Cola app worth installing?

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I drink Coca-Cola Zero almost every day. I know it’s an unhealthy habit but I’ve not yet felt the need to deal with it. As a frequent Coca-Cola consumer, when Coca-Cola Bulgaria started advertising their app, I installed it. I’ve been using it for almost two months, which qualifies me as an expert reviewer.

The Coca-Cola app lets you enter the unique 10-character alphanumeric codes hidden under the cap and probably somewhere inside cans. Each code gives you 1 or 2 coins, which you can then use to buy raffle tickets. The raffle awards vary from completely useless to just useless. I saw IKEA and Dominos vouchers a few times, otherwise not stuff an adult is likely to want.

Screenshot
Screenshot
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The awards, I challenge you to find the oddities.

Observations:

  • There are two types of coins in the app Diamond-shaped and C-shaped.
  • The diamond-shaped can only be obtained from the worst value Coca-Cola bottles, the 0.5l and 0.3l plastic ones. Probably from cans, although I couldn’t find any code there.
  • The C-shaped coins can mostly be used for raffles like a Coca-Cola umbrella or a ticket for the Coca-Cola annual concert.
  • A third type of coin was mentioned when I installed the app, and I must have 50 of it, but I never saw a raffle ticket that could be purchased with it or a place where I can see if I still have the 50 of that coin.
  • Despite collecting all these raffle tickets, the app doesn’t offer a way to see if you won anything or if anyone wins anything.
  • I’m unsure if I ever participated in a raffle or not.
  • Apparently, we have Coca-Cola imports from Moldova and Ukraine, and the bottles from these countries don’t have codes.

What’s the point of all of that?

It’s most likely to gamify the Coca-Cola consumption, targeting people who may be tempted by a GoPro camera, a VR set, or a low-end 40 inch TV. That is clearly not older adults. It attempts to add value to the worst-value Coca-Cola bottles that generate the most plastic waste but might be available in school cafeterias. I suspect it works well, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. Also, it is to discourage people from buying the imported Coca-Cola.

Did I win anything? I don’t think so. I expected that I will, at least, get an umbrella, a concert ticket, or get some indication that a raffle happened and I didn’t win. No Coca-Cola umbrella for me.