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A series of minor improvements for Ubuntu websites

In addition to using developer documentation (see A compact style for jQuery API documentation), people who work with communities need to use community and communication related websites. The bigger the community, the more tools it needs.

In a large community like Ubuntu, the amount of maintenance is big and the variety of platforms is huge. On top of these, many of the website aren’t directly maintained for the community (which has both good and bad sides). For these reasons, it’s sometimes hard and/or slow to get updates landed for the CSS files for the websites.

While workarounds aren’t ideal, at least we can fight the problematic styles with modern technology. That said, I’ve created a gist for a Stylish style that provides some minor improvements for some ubuntu.com websites.

Currently, the style brings the following improvements:

  • The last line of the chat is completely shown in Ubuntu Etherpad pads
  • Images and code blocks aren’t overlapping the content section in Planet Ubuntu, avoiding horizontal scrollbars fix is in production!
  • In the Ubuntu wiki, list items do not have a large bottom padding, making the lists more readable
  • Also in the wiki, tables are always full width but not too wide, keeping them aligned nicely

If you are constantly hitting other annoying styling issues on the Ubuntu websites, leave me a comment and I’ll see whether I can update the gist with a workaround. However, please report the bugs and issues for concerned maintaining parties as well, so we can stop using these workarounds as soon as possible. Thank you!

A compact style for jQuery API documentation

Everybody who develops websites – or pretty much anything – knows that you sometimes need to check something from the documentation. When you do that, you want to do that as quickly as possible, without distraction from the documentation itself.

One of the documentation I use more or less frequently is the jQuery API documentation. Unfortunately, while the website design is nice enough and works well for the non-documentation part, it is a bit distracting on the API documentation section and slows me down.

To fight this, I’ve written a simple Stylish style for api.jquery.com that makes the layout a bit more compact and thus gets less in the way. Again, the easiest way to get this Gist is the Raw button.

Enjoy!