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DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

developerhub.io

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#41
I see all these great recommendations for static site generators here for documentation! Does anyone have a recommendation for something thats geared more towards mechanical? Essentially I need to be able to show an image and the instructions next to it.

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#42
There is definitely room for competition in this space. We use Readme.io and find the pricing a little ridiculous. $100\month for the lowest tier plan. How complex is this product really?

Also, one minor thing that really gets to me is they get to watermark all of your docs with their logo. Like that $100\month is doing you a big favor so you have to pay them back with free advertising.

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#44
post #10

SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. Writing documentation is a big investment and startups tend to come and go ("it's been an incredible journey"). $39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible. Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive. Additionally the actual docs and demo si…

Hey @regecks, While confluence is extensible, what DeveloperHub.io provides is quite different from confluence offering. DeveloperHub.io is about unifying the experience for both technical writers and developers, while providing you top-notch support and user experience. Extensibility is inevitable, and we are working on integrations one by one as requested by our customers.

At the moment, we provide data portability on e-mail request, but very soon we'll provide you the tools to export and to handle your documentation outside of our website, and to import it back.

We are aware of the longer loading times in Australia due to having our servers in the Ireland. We will be launching soon our CDN to provide faster site speed. Sorry about that!

Keep updated!

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#45
post #21
post #10

SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. Writing documentation is a big investment and startups tend to come and go ("it's been an incredible journey"). $39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible. Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive. Additionally the actual docs and demo si…

The empty page dummy text rectangles are extremely annoying. There's no reason pure text needs a spinner.

Hey @pbreit, The outline exists to show the user where can they edit, we've tried previously without it and users were confused! The rectangles surely do not show on the live pages nonetheless.

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#46
post #15
post #10

SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. Writing documentation is a big investment and startups tend to come and go ("it's been an incredible journey"). $39/mo is much more than what it costs to self-host Confluence, which for all its flaws at least leaves you in control of your data and is super extensible. Improve the data portability story and it'd be a lot more attractive. Additionally the actual docs and demo si…

> SaaS-ifying your docs seems risky to me. It strikes me as a really, really bad idea. Besides the obvious lock-in issues, I've found the only hope of keeping documentation uptodate is to either generate it from the code or keep it checked it in git besides the code. What's really needed are (1) authoring tools that can produce decent documentation (ideally as docbook XML or maybe asciidoc) for checkin and (2) produc…

I'm happy to hear your feedback @dnomad. I'll be notifying you once we get to these challenges.

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#47
post #16

First of all this looks pretty nice. I'm a docs nerd and as a whole I like this. However ... It's slow. Docs should be static HTML. I should not ever wait for text content. If you want to async load some images or embeds that's fine, but I was waiting for the title to load! As an aside I recently had a nice experience making a static docs site using Nuxt and Vue. Nice combination of dynamic development and fast perfo…

I agree, this should have been HTML, not chasing the latest JavaScript fad. They managed to get links wrong. How on earth can you get something so easy and fundamental wrong!? I hold down command and click all the time to open in a new tab. They've got it opening in a new tab and following the link, so you can't stay in one place and open several tabs. This is something a beginner with an hour's experience of HTML ca…

Hey @JimDabell, We just launched the internal links feature yesterday in beta mode to test how the users use it! It is still not announced to the users. Your feedback is amazing and we will be looking to enhance it ;) Cheers, Z

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#48
post #16

First of all this looks pretty nice. I'm a docs nerd and as a whole I like this. However ... It's slow. Docs should be static HTML. I should not ever wait for text content. If you want to async load some images or embeds that's fine, but I was waiting for the title to load! As an aside I recently had a nice experience making a static docs site using Nuxt and Vue. Nice combination of dynamic development and fast perfo…

I agree with this in principle, except that a good docs library should also have nice full text searching capability. I've yet to see a FT search capability that works nicely with a static doc site.

Exactly! Static documentation has a limit of where it can go. It simply does not scale for big projects.

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#49

I find that the best way to build docs is to use some sort of a static html generator and host the html yourself, which is not at all hard to do. There are free and open source themes available to host your own docs in various site generators. My personal favorite is hugo. Previously I have built a documentation for a large project [0] using hugo and it gave us 100% control over how we design or host it. Outsourcing…

@stockkid hey! This works great for small dev teams, but once you get technical writers around and the team gets bigger, static documentation just doesn't cut it and is unable to scale with the demand. Hugo is amazing, but this is the same thing with buying your own hardware and racks, or hosting with Amazon. It's all about the managed service and peace of mind! Thanks, Z

Re: DeveloperHub.io: Create beautiful product documentation, hassle-free

#50
post #26

Congrats on launching! I regularly spend time on developer documentation (just yesterday roughly two hours...). Unfortunately, your messaging does not resonate with me at all. Creating (good) documentation will never be easy, or hassle-free. We have to communicate/teach technical concepts to a wide range of developers, from beginners to experts, from native-speakers to I-barely-understand-english. Having a huge docum…

Hey @cnj, Thanks a lot for your kind words. There are two steps for having your documentation online: 1- Creating the documentation service. 2- Maintaining the content.

We provide you #1 on a golden plate, saving you many hours per year of designing, coding, maintaining servers and working on integrations.

For #2, we are still getting started. We have been working with tens of technical writers in small, medium and large enterprises and we understand the problems that exist throughout this step. Look out for some amazing features that are coming soon.

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