Show HN: ReadMe.io – Beautiful Documentation Made Easy
readme.io
readme.io
Ergo, ReadMe! I wanted to do more than just documentation; it's a full developer hub for your community. The goal is to make it so any startup can have beautiful, interactive, collaborative, Stripe-quality docs without wasting valuable time.
HN has been a huge help while building it – I even picked the name after finding the domain for sale on HN :)
And I am amazed to see that you guys pulled it off with the living in a different country bit. Amazing! :)
What made you set the free trial to "till you launch" ? Don't you think some would use it for internal docs for there own reference or am i missing something ?
The "upgrade!" alerts get more and more naggy if the system detects you're cheating and using it for internal use :)
The ReadMe team is really responsive and helpful, the documentation is beautiful and the interface goes above and beyond.
Just to give you an idea of how polished the service is, if you select a background color that contrasts poorly with the text, the interface will let you know. It also automatically generates a "white" logo for darker pages. This has almost nothing to do with writing documentation, but has a lot to do with making documents readable for users, which is easy to overlook if you're not a designer.
See our docs: http://docs.heapanalytics.com/
Right now they are a transcription from http://heapanalytics.com/docs but we're planning more robust docs and ReadMe will make that process a lot smoother.
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.
None of us is personally offended by this language. We simply understand that it has no place in professional communications, because it can only really harm perception vis-a-vis just leaving it out and so probably isn't a smart business move.
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.
(Though my first thought wasn't "Who puts 'fucking' in their testimonials section," it was "Who puts 'fucking' in a business email to a new vendor?")
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 :)
I usually type fuck*ng or m*therfucking.
What extra value am I paying for?
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.
We've spent a lot of time putting together our API docs and it's nowhere as nice as this. The service they're providing is valuable to me as a way of solving this problem. I've never met or even heard of anyone working at readme.io btw - saw this on HN for the first time today.
Last time i watch at RTD it was a plain .md project import from e.g. GitHub only to show a plain documentation.
In Readme.io you can edit/write your docs, have blog function and an integrated discussion plattform (for support your users). If you not need this features, you can use RTD or directly sphinx.
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. ReadMe.io is a perfect fit.
IMO everybody should use https://readthedocs.org/ for documentation since all the docs will be put into elasticsearch (backed by Rackspace FYI) and the results when searching are of really good quality.
I totally also agree with the sentiment that people don't pay what most SaaS apps are worth. We save users 3-6 hours per month and charge $13 for the privilege, but even then people frequently complain about pricing (can't please everyone).
Just my 2c. Love the concept and could see myself using it, but the price point is just too much beyond free, compared to DIYing....but I'm an open source person, so that could just be internal biases.
What are the future plans for making this into a developer hub?
We've already built out a bunch of community features to make it more than "just docs", but we have a lot of things we're really excited about.
We want to do things like have an "application dashboard" (where users can manage API keys), some basic (optional!) API management, onboarding "wizard" and more – the whole developer experience should be cohesive.
Since you mentioned Swagger--We've started using API Blueprint for internal API design and collaboration. Do you have any plans to support importing from API Blueprint?
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.
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 :)
Edit: Feel free to contact me if you like the idea and would like to do it for KDE project. I'm a minor contributor and I might be able to ease the process.
Swagger (and a few other even cooler options) are on their way!
What are the cooler options?
(Also, the Blog link in your main menu on the home page 404s)
I really like your nice and clean template.
A similar project was in my mind since i create apiDoc, but due the lack of time i am happy now that you create such a project.
Will link to your site soon, so that apiDoc users can see your good alternative for creating and hosting a documentation.
I'd love to talk more! My email is greg@readme.io. Awesome work on apiDoc; it's been great.
Looks good otherwise though.
1. Saving Basic Auth credentials so the user doesn't have to paste it in each time they test an endpoint.
2. A way to automatically populate the request form fields by clicking on an example request.
Keep it up; all my colleagues think it's a beautiful and well done tool.
2. Same
Shoot me an email (support@readme.io) and I'll keep you updated on the progress of these two features. And in the meantime, I'd love to pick your brain on your use-case.