Consolidated Stale Pull Requests & Cleanup

* Resolved conflicts from olethanh's stale pull request #29, squashed his commits
* Included jlowin's fixes from #54
* Fixed some typos, added some docstrings
I'll ask @acslater00 to take a look at this bit of the PR. Everything else works fine, but this may result in BC incompatibility - it's a bit late at night for me to judge that atm ;)