The original blog was running WordPress, which is popular high-end blogging software. But WordPress needs lots of security updates, and it was a copy of WordPress that got hacked on the old server. So we've switched over GitHub Pages, which "pre-renders" all the pages to static HTML, so they're ultra-fast and there's no software to break into! Even better, GitHub Pages is completely free, and it uses the open source Jekyll blogging system, so we're not tied to GitHub.
But the new blog needs some love:
- We need people who want to write posts and language profiles!
- Some of the existing posts have formatting issues. I've starting tidying up some of the language profiles, but there's definitely more to do. Take a look at Chung's excellent and detailed Hungarian and Finnish profiles. The content is great, but the formatting could definitely be improved!
- The current "theme" of the site is simple, clean and fast. But it doesn't look much like the forum, and it could use some elegant visual touches. This work, however, requires some talent in both visual design and CSS.
How to edit the blog directly if you want to fix spelling, formatting or other errors
Happily, GitHub makes it easy for anybody to contribute. You can sign up for a GitHub account, and then go to the page for the Finnish profile. From there, look for the pencil icon and click on it:
This will allow you to fix the formatting on the page:
The text is formatted using Markdown, a very basic formatting language intended for writers. It's a bit like the BBCode we use to edit posts here, but even more simple in some ways.
You can click on "Preview" to see what your Markdown look like on the site:
Once you're done, scroll down and submit your proposed fix:
For historical reasons, a proposed change is called a "Pull Request" or "PR". If you submit a PR, GitHub will email me and rdearman. We can quickly scan your change and merge it by hitting a single button.
If you want to submit a new language profile or post, you can just go to whatever directory is approprite, and click Create New File.
If all this seems like too much work, you can always go ahead and propose new posts and language profiles here. (But for proofreading and fine-grained editing, it's probably easier to figure out GitHub. Still, it's up to you.)
Note that this is the same system we use for everything on the back end: The forum source code, the Super Challenge bot, even the scripts we use to manage the site. Basically the only things we keep secret are the passwords and the database (because it contains private user data)!