I had started out hoping to learn Meteor and contributing by taking up some of the issues listed in the issue tracker. But from one of our post-classroom discussion I learned from the Peerlibrary members that the Tumblr blog for Peerlibrary has many design issues. I had looked at the blog before and I felt the same. I felt that since the project was just gaining momentum, and the blog was a nice PR channel, I thought it would be nice to quickly fix those design bugs, as the others were busy doing other things.
Most of the design changes I made were tried out in the live editor available on the Tumblr site where one can directly change the HTML and CSS in the browser window and see the live changes and save the css and html theme immediately. At the end of a significant amount of work, I would save that code to the github repository. So I wouldn't create a pull request for each change I made, since these were trivial design changes and it was much easier to do them together on the live editor in the browser and then push all the work to github. These are the design fixes that I made to the blog, using mostly HTML and CSS :
- Changed the broken links in navigation tab at the top
- Added Disqus for comments. Comments are essential to having a blog, but Tumblr does not have that feature, so I used Disqus to effortlessly add the comments functionality
- Changed the design for the footer for every blog to include notes, comments and date of the post.
- Fixed the design for the whitespace after a blog text ends
- Changed the formatting for the notes section which was taking up too space.
- Fixed some color inconsistencies in the blog template
- Fixed the navigation between posts, which included a default, ugly looking previous and next arrow.
- Fixed fonts for the header of each blog, which was initially inconsistent between blog posts.
In the future, I would like to contribute more to the core source code of the project, but it seems difficult, because I am not familiar with Meteor. I dived into it a little bit, but haven't fully familiarized myself with it. I hope to finish an online tutorial and get some reading done from the Meteor book this weekend and then take up one of the issues in the issue tracker.
Tying it to the readings, I think my motivation to contribute to Peerlibrary started out as "Need drives code creation" (these issues need to be fixed and I should help), and I can help but then quickly turned into contributing for "Fun" as I took up a part of the work that I was familiar with (HTML and CSS) and enjoy doing (Design! Yaay!).
added Comments Thomas 11/6/2013 (see commit description)