Weston Ruter

Building a Better Web

Blog

  • Creating Gutenberg Blocks without a Build Step via HTM

    Creating Gutenberg Blocks without a Build Step via HTM

    If you’ve ever looked into developing a block for the new WordPress editor (Gutenberg), you’ve seen that it’s recommended to code it up with JSX. Blocks are powered by React and the JSX syntax is significantly more readable and less verbose than the ES5-compatible syntax. For example, compare this ES5 code: With this equivalent in…

  • Becoming a Googler

    Becoming a Googler

    I often see tweets from people in the industry announcing major career changes; I never expected that I would be adding to this stream, but today I am. After more than 8 years at XWP/X-Team, I am starting at Google as of October 1st. I’m joining the Developer Relations team at Google to work on…

  • WordCamp Europe 2018 Recap: AMP and PWA

    WordCamp Europe 2018 Recap: AMP and PWA

    Recently I attended WCEU 2018 in Belgrade with quite a few colleagues from XWP. We were there in large part to promote the adoption of progressive technologies in WordPress. We spent a lot of our time at the Google booth where we had an area to talk about contributing to WordPress across a wide range of roles. I spent…

  • Remember Me Easter Egg

    Here’s a fun little easter egg to add to your WordPress login screen: make it so when you click the “Remember Me” checkbox that the song of the same name from Coco autoplays at the bottom of the login form: Here’s a quick and dirty plugin that does it: This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that…

  • Spoken Word: Bringing Read-Along Speech Synthesis to the Web

    Update 2020-01-16: Back in December 2009 I did a hackathon to create an HTML5 Audio Read-Along (demo) which highlighted the text of words spoken in the corresponding audio being played. To introduce the project I wrote: As I further note in the project’s readme, the process I used to create this read-along demo was extremely tedious. It…

  • “Building with JavaScript in the Customizer” at WCUS 2017

    At WordCamp US 2017 I gave a talk on “Building with JavaScript in the Customizer”. I was happy to have the opportunity to share the technical details on the Customizer’s architecture and JavaScript API, which saw many improvements in 4.9, in addition to being able to share the Customizer’s new user-facing features during State of the Word. The…

  • Presenting WordPress 4.8 & 4.9 at State of the Word 2017

    Presenting WordPress 4.8 & 4.9 at State of the Word 2017

    At WordCamp US 2017 last week, Mel Choyce and I had the opportunity to present the new features in WordPress 4.8 and 4.9 which we co-lead with Jeff Paul. We start presenting ~17 minutes into the State of the Word: State of the Word, 2017 (Photos courtesy of Jeff Golenski and Post Status.)

  • Slides for “Building with JavaScript in the Customizer” WCUS 2017 Talk

    Here are the slides from my WCUS 2017 talk “Building with JavaScript in the Customizer”

  • Mel Choyce’s Recap on WordPress 4.9

    Whereas my recap post about WordPress 4.9 focused mostly on the new features and enhancements, my co-release lead Mel Choyce just published a great post that gets into more of the process aspects of the release, including the key contributors: I think that 4.9 went really well by having essentially three co-release leads: Mel Choyce…

  • WordPress 4.9

    For the past few months I’ve been co-leading the WordPress 4.9 release with Mel Choyce (and Jeff Paul too). I’m really excited about all the new features and enhancements we’ve built which will now be rolling out across 29% of the Internet(!). WordPress 4.9 “Tipton” In particular I’m excited about the powerful new capabilities being added to the…