Tag: WordPress

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.

Update on the new writing prompts

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I kept an eye on the new writing prompts that we shipped last week. I was curious to see if people like them or not. Also, some of these are just a little bit unorthodox and may not be to the everyone’s liking.

So far:

Best writing prompt:

What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?

Worst new writing prompt:

What’s the most interesting local custom you’ve encountered?

And the first unusual one is today’s prompt:

What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living?

I’ll have to post a true answer to this one but so far, the origins of it have only been hinted on my blog. Books create clutter. I have many. They take up living space. It’s kipple. As Philip K. Dick says:

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself.

So my wife discovered Marie Kondo and thanks to her book, I was able to get rid of half of my clothes and a sizable portion of the books. But we are losing this battle.

Today’s writing prompt is invited by our family’s battle with books, clothes, fitness devices, and toys nobody plays with. Old Apple devices and their fancy boxes. Chargers. Cables.

Daily writing prompt
What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living?
View all responses

New Writing Prompts

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s a moment you wish you could freeze and live in forever?
View all responses

Faust broke his contract with Mephistopheles by asking time to stop. It’s a funny blogging prompt to appear today… so let me explain why it shows up, to the horror of everyone who expected the usual May 4th writing prompt and instead sees something new (OMG, it’s Star Wars Day).

I used to rely on writing prompts quite often because I’d run out of blogging ideas. After a 365-day blogging streak, they started repeating. Then, after 730 days, they repeated again. I wanted something fresh, so I began collecting prompt ideas in a spreadsheet, aiming to gather 730 fresh ones. I sourced them from good posts in the Reader, brainstormed with AI, the Sunshine Blogger Award, and picked some from the engagement threads on Reddit. I got to around 400–450, then started cleaning them up aggressively and eventually finalized a list of 366.

My colleague Tess then improved them by rewriting those that weren’t in proper English. She deleted the weakest ones. What’s left is this new batch of writing prompts.

They’re not perfect. I had some goofy and fun ones that didn’t make it to the final list out of concern some of you may find them inappropriate. So here we are.

We have a hackathon called “Radical Speed Month,” where we can ship cool changes without going through the usual approval process. I wish I could dedicate a few more days to this idea but I count my minutes because there are other areas that also need love and are at least as fun.

I hope you like the new prompts. If not, I take full responsibility.

PS. The results of the prompts API call is heavily cached and the new batch of prompts may appear to you within 24h.

If you could change one thing in WordPress.com, what would it be?

~ Veselin ~ 21 Comments

I’ll likely have the opportunity to fix or improve some unusual things next month, well outside my area of expertise. I’ve been thinking about making Writing Prompts and blogging streaks more interesting 🙂 and I’m looking for other ideas.

Is there one or more changes on WordPress.com you’d love to see? Open to suggestions.

Here’s a cat to grab your attention 🙂

WordCamp Sofia 2026

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I joined the team for WordCamp Sofia for another year. This will be my third year in a row as part of the organizing team. The last two years were great, the teams were strong, and I hope we’ll have a good time together again.

Just a few photos from last year to add color to the announcement.