Doreen Michele

For the first time ever, I submitted a pull request yesterday to an open source project notifying them of a typo. It was accepted within hours. Submitting the pull request was easy and took almost no time. The process of submitting it gave me valuable prompts, such as "This field is typically no more than 50 characters." I've been on Hacker News for over eleven years. I began wondering how on earth I can contribute to open source as a non-coder a few years back. I've talked to other non-coders who were just as mystified as I was -- or more mystified -- as to how on earth you get into open source as a non coder. So, no, it isn't just me. I spent probably a few hours yesterday trying to sort out how on earth to notify them of their typo. It took me far, far longer to figure out what I needed to do than it took to do it. This is a huge barrier to entry and will stop most people before they begin. Most people simply can't give you three hours of their t

A few hours ago, I submitted my first ever pull request . I mean to something other than the Hello World project Github walks you through to show you the basics. It has now been approved by the maintainer and merged. And, wow, I need to get this off my chest: You programmers are completely unnecessarily scaring off non-programmers from your Open Source projects. This is how this went down: I saw a piece on Hacker News that interested me and I opened it up to find that it was a Github repository. I began reading the documentation and noticed a typo. One of the titles said "Funtion" instead of "Function" in it. So I was like "I would like to tell them." Now the last time I wanted to tell someone in Open Source they had a typo, I left a comment on Hacker News to do it. They did fix it and apparently took some of my other advice as well. But this time the article didn't have a lot of comments. It only has two, in fact. So I felt like le

Before I was a blogger, I was a talented moderator on a homeschooling list. This year, I have kind of taken that back up again via Reddit. This is my current list of Reddits (yes, I sort of randomly added some spaces to the List to make it matchup some with the image on my laptop): r/ClothingStartups r/GigWorks r/CitizenPlanners r/aberdeenwa r/UrbanForestry r/Seward r/HousingWorks r/pocketputer r/frenchwardrobe r/Walkable r/CoastalWA r/HealthWorks r/Knits r/SolanoRail r/NorthToAlaska r/NorthToAlsaska r/Relo r/TheCrescent I created Urban Forestry just days ago and until today it had one member, me. I announced it on r/UrbanPlanning today and it was up to 27 members as I began this post, which makes it larger than about three-quarters of the Reddits I own. I am not even done with putting this post together and that figure is already out of date. It's continuing to pick up members owing to t

Labels can be useful for organizing information on your site and making it more discoverable and transparent for your audience. They show up and read an article about a particular topic and if they like it and it has a good label, they can click on the label to find other articles on the same subject which may be of interest to them. But sometimes when I reorganize a site, I don't like the labels I have been using. Then, when you go to pick a label, Blogger gives you a drop down list of all the labels you have ever used and it includes labels only found on draft posts. So if you have done a major reorganization and don't want those labels cluttering up your drop down list, you have to go back through all your draft posts and either delete or update all appearances of any labels you would like to permanently retire. That's the only way I know to get them out of your list. It's annoying, but it usually only takes a few minutes. It can be well worth the reductio

People often stress about picking a business name, especially if they are new to doing business. On the one hand, that's not unreasonable. On the other hand, you really shouldn't overthink it at this stage. First, An Anecdote I worked at Aflac for a few years. I've never personally tripped across an official telling of this story anywhere, though I have tried to tell it on various blogs (probably all redacted) and in forum comments. Aflac's actual name is American Family Life Assurance Company . Aflac is really an acronym for their legal name. So it's sort of like going by your initials or a nickname. Everyone knows Bill is short for William, so no one acts like you are trying to fool people or deceive them if you introduce yourself as Bill and go by that name socially, even though your bank account says William They were originally incorporated under the name American Family Life Insurance Company . According to stories I heard internally while I worke

Until a few days ago, this site -- doreenmichele.blogspot.com -- was my personal blog and I had a separate site at DoreenTraylor.com that I thought of as my professional site where I had information on how to hire me to do resume work and the like. About three days ago, I fairly spontaneously redacted all the personal blog posts from this site and set about merging the two sites into one. Now, DoreenTraylor.com redirects here. Most of the content was moved over from the other site. The only content I kept from my personal blog were the pages called Me , My Websites and References . I also took design elements from both. I kept the pink and white template from my personal blog but added a pinned (permanent) Featured Post with the same photo from the other site. I also substantially edited a lot of the content from both sites to make everything more polished. DoreenTraylor.com Updated DoreenMichele.blogspot.com I have no idea if I will end up making a new personal blog el

The four newest BlogSpot themes are: Contempo, Soho, Emporio and Notable. Unlike previous themes, they are mobile optimized , so I no longer use the older themes. You can just use a default design package, but you can also easily insert an image of your choosing to customize your site. You can add your own image in a variety ways, such as in place of the Background, in an Image Widget or behind the Header. My sample Image for this post For simplicity's sake, all these screenshots are from a desktop PC. I am not including any screenshots from a smartphone. But if you are doing design work, always check both anytime you change anything. Contempo The background image for this theme is placed behind the header. The samples below are the second version of Contempo. Blogger Admin Panel Default With sample background image Using an Image widget above posts instead of a Background image As a Header background image Header background image paired wi