It’s really hard to overstate the incredible nature of the open source community, but if you head over to CourtListener, you’ll find that between yesterday and today the entire website has been revamped. This was done over the past month by a volunteer developer who took time off work to give every single page in the entire site a fresh lick of paint.
On top of just plain looking better, the new site has a raft of improvements that we’re excited about:
- The entire site from top to bottom can now be used from your phone, tablet or desktop. Complicated pages will do the right thing to adapt to smaller or bigger screens. (Yes, we now use bootstrap.)
- The accessibility of the site has been vastly improved for people with motility or vision difficulties. Over the next few days we’ll continue rolling out improvements in this area that will trickle down even to keyboard-heavy users.
- Sharing pages on Facebook or Twitter and saving the site to your desktop on iOS, Android or Windows now works properly, with good titles, descriptions and meta data.
This post is supposed to be about the new version of the site, but I can’t help but gush about the open source community and the smart people that it attracts. For our part, we did a little bit of deployment work and a few design sessions, but this developer came in, fixed every page of the site and then gave us a new and beautiful version. That’s incredible and it’s something that we could never do outside of the open source community. It was also particularly nice that, thanks to geographic proximity, we got to have two in-person sessions during the process.
This update makes CourtListener ready for the next several years and modernizes the way it looks so that it feels right regardless of if you visit on your phone, computer, Playstation, or whatever. With thousands of people visiting each day, we couldn’t be more excited to provide this update.
Let us know what you think and if you’re interested in helping build the next feature like this one, get in touch! There’s always more work to do. We’d love to hear from you.
