Alex "Gus" Gustafson

Category: WordPress

  • Cheesy goodness

    An unexpected treat during this meetup was a visit to the St. James Cheese Company, in Uptown, New Orleans. Even got to ride bikes there. Jeremey and I sampled several bits of cheese while making our purchase, but one of them I particularly liked was from Good Shepherd Cheese in Owingsville, KY.

    With my brief stint in the Kentucky cheese scene, I thought I had tasted most of the quality producers from the commonwealth. This one I had missed, and boy was it tasty. Unpasteurized sheep’s milk cheese is delightful and rare in KY. Funny that it took a trip to Louisiana to have some.

    The St. James Cheese Company offers a fine selection, and creates the cheese plates for several excellent restaurants as well.
    The St. James Cheese Company offers a fine selection, and creates the cheese plates for several excellent restaurants as well.

    I heard about the St. James Cheese Company while eating dinner at Sylvain. Several of us shared cheese plates:

    The cheese plate at Sylvain.
    The cheese plate at Sylvain.

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  • Trivia at The Irish House

    I haven’t gotten to play trivia in quite a while. This was fun.

    Alex's avatarGus Bus Trivia

    I’m away on business, but somehow found time to play trivia at The Irish House, with occasional help from Automatticians and some friends from Github who are also meeting up in town.

    Got 3rd place. 🙂

    I was the captain of "Team Jetmap" during trivia tonight. I was the captain of Team Jetmap during trivia tonight.

    View original post

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  • Upgraded Stats and Navigation Enhancements on WP.com

    Upgraded Stats and Navigation Enhancements.

    I’ve had the pleasure of testing out a lot of the new changes happening at WordPress.com. This new stuff is seriously exciting for us!

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  • Spoiler Text

    My wife gave me a mini code challenge for her post today.

    She wanted to hide some spoilers from a book review. We’d rather hide the spoilers behind a click or hover, and I normally would accomplish that with a bit of jQuery, but her blog is hosted on WordPress.com so interactivity wasn’t really an option with only CSS available for editing.

    A simple, one-time solution could’ve been to change the text color of the spoiler to the same as her background color, allowing the reader to highlight the text and read the text. But I wanted to give her something she could use again in future book reviews, so this little CSS class seemed easy enough.

    I helped her wrap the spoiler text in some span tags:

    <span class="spoiler-text">Spoiler</span>

    Then added this CSS to her WordPress.com Customizer.

    
.spoiler-text {
     background: #574d4d;
     color: #574d4d;
     display: run-in;
}

.spoiler-text::before {
     content: "Highlight to read Spoilers";
     color: #fff;
     display: run-in;
}

    The result is an inline block of color you can highlight to reveal the spoiler, with a note added.

    spoilertextonbrewsandewes

    The color #574d4d was her original text color, so that’s what I went with for the color block. Changed the text color for the class as well in case she edits her default text color in the future.

    She liked this well enough so it’s up and running. 🙂

    Leave a comment if you have other ideas on how to handle spoiler text with only CSS.

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  • Keep Meetups Weird

    I had a good time in Austin, TX this week.

    The Austin Skyline from South Congress.
    The Austin Skyline from South Congress.

    More importantly, I actually got to meet my first round of Automatticians in person. We ate a ton of good food, did a lot of fun stuff, and did a lot of work. We’re a fully-distributed company, so we normally we only communicate online. When you put us in the same room, it’s kind of amazing how quickly a big project can come together. We also shared a lot of ideas and I’ve got a lot of new tools I’m ready to take home and make my day-to-day more productive.

    Now I can’t wait for my team’s meetup in 2015. 🙂

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  • Snow

    I love the WordPress snow feature. It makes me happy.

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  • Capital Factory

    I’m in Austin, TX with another team of Automattic Happiness Engineers. We paid a quick visit to Capital Factory, a co-working space here. We all thought the setup was cool. Or at least its height was cool.
    capitolfactory

    Today we needed some time to talk out ideas, and the conference rooms were all booked. We decided not to disrupt the general room with our chatter and worked out of the hotel — but tomorrow we will be back in their big room.

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  • The Famous 5-Minute Install

    Today I created a new site proudly powered by WordPress.

    Every other time I’ve fired up a self-hosted project, I’ve used a quick install like the one provided by BlueHost. This time, I wanted to learn something new so I went through The Famous 5-Minute Install.

    Everyone should walk through the Famous 5-Minute Install at least once. It’s super clear, takes just a couple minutes more than the instant install, and gives you a tiny bit more clarity on exactly what’s happening. It’s sometimes nice to be reminded that all this software is really just a bunch of text files arranged in a particular way.

    I broke the rules a bit (not apologizing.) I transferred all the WordPress files over FTP (step 4) and while I was waiting for that, I setup the database (step 2). Just made more sense to you. If you like rules you can wait the 30 seconds more. 🙂

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  • Newmattician

    Automattic loves the swag. I love Automattic. Bagheera loves the box.

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