Faz Islam via Unsplash

FIFA certainly picked the right place and time to super-size the World Cup.

This North American edition of the tournament has been absolutely magical so far, starting with the actual matches in the Cup's first ever 48-team field. For us Americans, it's also been humbling — and surprising — to see an outpouring of joyous social media posts by visitors discovering various staples of daily life here.

Witness tourists' marveling over American barbecue, free soda refills, air conditioned stadiums, military flyovers, ranch dressing, and more. Likewise, we yanks have been delighted to discover some of the visiting fans' football-related customs for the first time.

In that spirit, I've now created an interactive World Cup guidebook as a web app, including live scores, information on the history of the tournament, past winners, and venues for this year's matches.

Sticker price is $4.99. But for subscribers to my personal email list, I have created a few discounts, as a show of my appreciation for you following my content over the years.

If you use the discount code OGSUBS at checkout, the guidebook app is 100% free to you for subscribing to my personal email updates. You can also share the discount code HEADER20 with up to five friends who will each get 20% off.

Please spread the word! And the Cup!

A special shout-out to my friend Ali Jackson, a jazz musician whose son plays Major League Soccer. It was conversations with Ali about international football that inspired me to create the guidebook, frankly.

For any developers out there, I should also point out that I've open sourced the guidebook's code on GitHub under MIT license. So please do feel free to experiment with the code yourself, make changes, bug fixes, and/or pull requests on GitHub. I welcome collaboration there to continue to make the app better for fans through the end of the Cup in mid-July! ⚽

Finally, if your company or organization needs help on an upcoming software project, please email me directly at [email protected] or book a discovery call here.

With a dollop of AI assistance, I've been getting into more development tasks lately. Combined with my earlier experience marketing and writing about tech, I'm really excited about the possibilities from here. 🙃