Hosting Sphinx documentation on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Hosting Sphinx documentation on GitHub

datadesk.latimes.com

34 pointspalewire7 comments

Quickly publish documentation alongside your code by following this easy recipe.

This is a meta comment but I think others might have the same reaction: LA Times? Nice to see something other than "what digital camera you should buy this month" in a technology column from a traditional/transitioning media company.

Indeed: a regular column devoted to "maps, databases and visualization". Between this and the NYT's work and writing about information graphics and data mining, the "newspaper" segment of traditional media seems to be among the most innovative.

Thanks for the compliment. We have a small team in the newsroom that does data analysis and web development.

You can keep up with all our latest work by following @LATdatadesk on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/LATdatadesk

Our evergreen projects are linked from our index page at: http://datadesk.latimes.com/

We have a number of open-source projects on GitHub. http://github.com/datadesk/

We also have an array of tools for the routine publishing of data-driven news: graphics.latimes.com, spreadsheets.latimes.com, documents.latimes.com and timelines.latimes.com.

Finally, tonight we'll be mapping live election results from the Iowa Caucuses. Check latimes.com after 5:30 pm PST.

> Nice to see something other than "what digital camera you should buy this month" in a technology column from a traditional/transitioning media company.

It's not really a column though, it's the blog of their webdev/analysis team ("Data Desk"). Ben had previously posted about them releasing a hyphenation django app.

I had exactly the same sentiments while reading the article. A rather unexpected source for such an article.

I would like to add the Guardian to your list of newspapers which make innovative use of data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

An alternative is to host the documentation on readthedocs[0] instead: rtfd is dedicated to hosting sphinx documentations so it'll build the documentation on its own, it understands git (and mercurial, and bazaar, and svn) repositories[1] and it provide webhooks to get it to update your documentation on push[2]. In fact, Github has built-in support for rtfd so you only need to check the corresponding option.

That way, no need to mess around with committing your (compiled) doc in a separate branch and remembering to push your compiled artifacts.

[0] http://readthedocs.org/

[1] http://read-the-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/features.html...

[2] http://read-the-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/webhooks.html

RTD is the easiest way to do this. It works wonderfully, is free, and if you use GitHub's project hooks in your project settings, the builds start almost immediately after a push.

I used to do what this post suggested, but got tired of managing all of the gh-pages branches as I changed/added new projects.

I should have mentioned alternatives in my post. Thanks for picking me up. Readthedocs is a great option.

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