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Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

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Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#31

Post by phlakaton »

curiously wrote: post #27
benbristow wrote: post #21

"ReadMe has made our lives infinitely easier. We've had it on our todo list for over a year, and a day after finding ReadMe we had our docs launched. We're super impressed. You guys have built a fucking awesome tool." I don't know, but having swearing on a professional website is probably not the best way to go. Looks like a nice startup though.

to be fair the people who get appalled by reading the f-word are probably not the target customer. who drops f-word all the time? programmers, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, managers. certainly not established 100 year old corporation, but most certainly the hip, fast moving, horny, 20~30 something olds who eat and breathe technology.

Hey, I'm one of those, I think! For me, dropping a few in a conversation is one thing. Seeing it chiseled onto a web page is quite another.

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#32

Post by callmeed »

I've seen a couple of these projects lately. They are really cool and I see the need.

What seems to be missing (and is a no-brainer in my opinion) are auto-generated client libraries. It seems like you could easily create Ruby, Python, and PHP libraries if you know their API endpoints, methods and parameters. At the very least, you could create a starting point for them.

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#33

Post by nodesocket »

forsaken wrote: post #26
nodesocket wrote: post #23

We just released our API on apiary ( http://docs.commando.apiary.io ), but after finding ReadMe.io on ProductHunt, we signed up for a paid plan that very day, and are in the process of migrating over. Our focus for our API documentation is beautifully designed and easy to read. All the extra features of Apiary and Mashup such as proxying, rate limiting, billing, and mocking requests are not really a priority for us.…

What made you decide to get a paid plan instead of the free plan?

Mainly, we are a startup ourself, and we know how much blood sweat and tears goes into it. ReadMe.io provides us a lot of value, and thus we want to pay to make sure that value stays around. Also, using our own domain is nice. :-)

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#34

Post by gkoberger »

callmeed wrote: post #32

I've seen a couple of these projects lately. They are really cool and I see the need. What seems to be missing (and is a no-brainer in my opinion) are auto-generated client libraries. It seems like you could easily create Ruby, Python, and PHP libraries if you know their API endpoints, methods and parameters. At the very least, you could create a starting point for them.

100% agreed. I wanted to get that feature done for the HN launch, but it didn't make the cut.

We have a lot of APIs using us now, so we're going to revamp our API endpoint builder with our new knowledge, and this will be a huge part of it. Check back in about a week :)

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#35

Post by codezero »

forsaken wrote: post #22
codezero wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This came up when we were working on this, the team at ReadMe has been very responsive about this and I don't feel like we'll be trapped on the platform. They use Markdown for almost everything except some widgets, and since I'm going to use mainly Markdown I don't feel locked in. I also feel confident that if I kindly asked for the contents of my site, the team at ReadMe would send it on over in what ever way they c…

Sorry about that. I thought it sounded negative and didn't want to talk badly about the product. My question was basically "Are you okay with publishing content on a site that owns the content?" I imagine they are building export tools in the future, and this is just the first version.

I don't think it was negative, that's exactly the kind of question my co-workers asked when we were talking about ReadMe.

I'm OK with it. I've found that more often than not, questionable third parties skimming content and republishing outside any control tend to steal your content and misuse it more than providers that have a solid service do. I trust the ReadMe team to do the right thing and if they don't, instead of leaving supportive comments on Hacker News, I'll rant :)

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#36

Post by codezero »

jonahx wrote: post #24

This looks nice but $60/mo seems incredibly pricey when there are also nice, and similar, open source solutions such as http://ricostacruz.com/flatdoc/ What extra value am I paying for?

I use ReadMe, and I haven't used flatdoc, so correct me if I make an assumption about what it does.

A huge benefit of ReadMe is the document organization and drafting capabilities. I no longer have a bunch of Dropbox folders that I save Byword Markdown docs to.

I can organize things in a reasonably sane way, and when I am writing new docs (think of docs as a living organism) I can write them in ReadMe and decide when and how to publish them.

It removes a lot of duct tape and glue compared to other solutions I have looked at.

I think if your aim is to crank out a few pages of Markdown and host them on a static site generator, other options might be good for you. ReadMe is definitely first class if you want to create a corpus, and present it beautifully without a bunch of extra steps.

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#37

Post by gkoberger »

benbristow wrote: post #21

"ReadMe has made our lives infinitely easier. We've had it on our todo list for over a year, and a day after finding ReadMe we had our docs launched. We're super impressed. You guys have built a fucking awesome tool." I don't know, but having swearing on a professional website is probably not the best way to go. Looks like a nice startup though.

We debated about this a lot. Jesse wrote to us via our Olark plugin, so there was a back-and-forth – he didn't just start swearing. He was one of our first customers, and having someone we didn't know love our product was awesome.

We liked how enthusiastic and genuine it sounded, and I've personally never liked when people type "f*cking" (we're all adults; that asterisk isn't tricking anyone.). But alas, we've removed it for now :)

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#39

Post by kelseyfrancis »

phlakaton wrote: post #31
curiously wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair the people who get appalled by reading the f-word are probably not the target customer. who drops f-word all the time? programmers, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, managers. certainly not established 100 year old corporation, but most certainly the hip, fast moving, horny, 20~30 something olds who eat and breathe technology.

Hey, I'm one of those, I think! For me, dropping a few in a conversation is one thing. Seeing it chiseled onto a web page is quite another.

Agreed. Would you want to see that your doctor's written stuff like that in your chart (e.g., "Patient's got some really fucking bad gout!")? No? Then maybe it's unprofessional.

Re: Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy

#40

Post by claar »

curiously wrote: post #27
benbristow wrote: post #21

"ReadMe has made our lives infinitely easier. We've had it on our todo list for over a year, and a day after finding ReadMe we had our docs launched. We're super impressed. You guys have built a fucking awesome tool." I don't know, but having swearing on a professional website is probably not the best way to go. Looks like a nice startup though.

to be fair the people who get appalled by reading the f-word are probably not the target customer. who drops f-word all the time? programmers, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, managers. certainly not established 100 year old corporation, but most certainly the hip, fast moving, horny, 20~30 something olds who eat and breathe technology.

Personally I find the "hip" use of curse words a red flag for working with a company.

If you can't even be professional on your external-facing site, it's a certainty that I'll have to put up with much worse unprofessionalism in our closer business relationship.

But that's just me, and I don't pretend to be in the majority among the HN/reddit crowd.

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