Inspiring Online is an open source blog used to share interesting, and inspiring things from the online landscape.
Inspiring Online aims to be a blog for those looking for encouragement, and inspiration in the tech world, but is also an experiment. The entire blog is open source, so anyone can submit amendments to posts, fix spelling mistakes, add discussion links, and create new posts too! Ideally, it's a great starting area for someone to enter the open source world!
If you're looking to get into open source, and want a little help through your first contribution (Inspiring Online is a great place for that!) you can join the chat at Gitter, and we'll help you out!
There are a lot of ways to contribute to this project. Really, we want what you have! This is a great place to get started with open source code. Break down that initial barrier (it was really scary for me, but once it's down, the floodgates are open for you).
Here are a few ways to get started:
- Submit a pull request from an approved proposal. This means, adding the image, and the Markdown file to create the post, as well as writing a little something about it. Not too much (we're not really that wordy)... Kapow, done!
- Submit an awesome website! This involves opening an issue with
[proposal]as the first word. And a link to something you think is creative and awesome. - Fix a spelling mistake! I'm not perfect at all, I must make 100 of these a day. Even if it's a small pull request, we'd love to see it!
- Mark a post's site as broken. If you find a post for a site that's no longer working, mark it as down in its front matter.
Please, take a look at the Wiki. It provides in-depth information about contributing to Inspiring Online.
Start by making sure you have Ruby installed:
ruby -v
If nothing appears as a result, install Ruby.
Then install Bundler, if you don't already have it:
gem install bundler
Now, if you're going to be making changes to this site you'll want to make a fork of the repository. This makes it easier for you to make changes and get them reviewed before they're added to the live site.
Once you've forked the repository you'll want to access that code on your own computer. To do this just clone the repository down to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/username/inspiring-online.git
(Make sure to replace username with your username.)
Then you need to navigate into your newly cloned repository:
cd inspiring-online
The last thing you need to do before you can run locally is do a bundle install to install the required gems.
Then just run jekyll serve to see the website running on http://localhost:4000.
If you get any errors or warnings, try running bundle exec jekyll serve instead.
Naturally, for Inspiring Online to keep a good quality, we can't accept any old post. For new people, there should be a bunch of [proposal]s on the project's issues page; these are great starting points. Similarly, if you spot a mistake or problem in a post, you can patch that up too! I see so many pull requests fixing readmes ... they're totally welcome here!
We're looking for posts, images, and links that inspire people. These can range from great talks to creative code to awesome design. Here're a few little examples:
- Emotions With CSS is an awesome talk. Well worthy!
- Music Emojis is a great little design project.
- This glitch effect is an amazing example of creative code.
Sadly, we don't really want everything... we've got to keep the quality up, and some things can taint that.
- Please don't post your own things. I know self promoting is fun, but it's kind of against the spirit of what we're trying to do.
- Let's keep advertising to a minimum. That's not to say it's ruled out, sometimes advertising is really really creative... we just don't want to be full of it.
- Let's try to keep the articles based around new and upcoming things. Ro.me is still amazing, but we've seen it before!
If ideas and proposals really fill up in the GitHub issues, we might move to a link drop at the end of the week including a lot of things.
Most importantly, don't be offended if we turn something down. We're here to work with you and make the most out of your contributions, and ideally won't have to turn much down!
Nothing is perfect. We're totally still figuring this whole thing out. Got a problem? – please open up an issue on the repository. That way, you're guaranteed to get something back.
See the license file for license rights and limitations (MIT).