Volunteer github guru for documentation submissions?

Devin Asay devin_asay at byu.edu
Mon Apr 11 19:58:25 EDT 2016


On Apr 11, 2016, at 4:14 PM, Mark Smith <Mark_Smith at cpe.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Jackie. That one is now submitted. Have any others (send me your list
> if you'd like)? Once I've done this a few times I'd like to abbreviate the
> instructions (but I need to understand the process a bit better).

Mark,

I’m on the same learning curve as you right now. I’m having no problem finding little problems to fix—I just browse through dictionary entries for terms I’m pretty familiar with and do a close reading of the whole thing—syntax, examples, description, the works. I almost always find some little thing that needs fixing, like misspellings, missing examples and inaccuracies/omissions in the description. One common problem is missing or inappropriate entries in the “Related” category. For example, in one document I found that there were cross references to “keyword” where it really should have been “object” or “glossary". E.g. in the HTMLText document there were cross references to field (keyword) that really should have been field (object). 

Here are a couple of github lessons learned so far:

Don’t start in the main develop branch (livecode/livecode/develop) when making documentation fixes; instead use the community-docs branch at https://github.com/livecode/livecode/tree/community-docs and make edits there. Maybe that is obvious to others; it wasn’t to me.

As long as you’re editing a document, do the close reading I talked about and make all of the changes at once. A couple of times I’ve found something I missed and had to go back and re-edit then re-submit the pull request.

It’s been a learning curve, but the good news is my head doesn’t hurt quite as much as it did last week. :)

Devin


Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University



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