We've added the ability to customize how Owlbot responds to questions it is asked. You can tweak the tone it uses, the length of responses, prevent it from using specific words in the response (such as competitors), and set your own default response when it doesn't know an answer.

SEO Improvements

Customers now have more control over specific SEO settings in their documentation. You can now edit metadata keywords for pages, disable robots.txt on a per project basis, and add a noindex tag to specific pages.

🪶 Other Improvements

• GraphQL Beta: Adds instructions for providing auth via a custom webhook directly in the product
• Developer Dashboard: Add a new slack group for users looking to get started and ask questions. Come say hi!

🐛 Bugs Eaten (by Owlbert)

• Recipes: Fix copy code button
• Project Export: Fix export for versions with specific semver formats
• Owlbot: Fix jumpiness when typing in the documentation
• Owlbot: Fix issue saving logs of questions asked

We’ve added more options to customize your changelog—including date, author, and layout.

Owlbot AI Data Export

Customers using Owlbot can now export data. We’ve also added options filter and set custom date ranges to the admin dashboard.

🪶 Other Improvements

• Owlbot AI: Now re-indexes more often (hourly).
• SEO: Added an option to include/exclude projects from your robots.txt file.
• SEO: Added an option to include keywords to pages.

🐛 Bugs Eaten (by Owlbert)

• Editor: Images with captions now have cursor: pointer set, like all other images.
• Editor: Images in lists no longer prevent the page from saving.
• Dark Mode: Fixed an issue with dark mode on glossary UI.
• Navigation: Fixed the browser’s back function not taking you back on 404 pages.
• Developer Dashboard: Fixed an issue where request body was not being displayed when sending formData.
• Developer Dashboard: Fixed an issue where end-user API Keys weren’t appearing on Authentication pages.
• Login: Added missing validation to login fields.
• Suggested Edits: Fixed an issue where suggested edits would crash when typing [
• Search: Custom pages appear in search results more reliably.

ReadMe added the ability for users to view all of their API calls directly in the reference section. We brought all of the filters and graphs from the My Developers page in the admin dashboard into the documentation. Users can user this to easily see how they are using an API and debug any issues they might have. Learn more about this and related features here: https://blog.readme.com/customize-dx-developer-dashboard/

🪶 Other Improvements

• API Reference: API Keys in the reference section are now sorted by most recently used.

🐛 Bugs Eaten (by Owlbert)

• Owlbot AI: Continued fixing indexing issues including better handling of special characters and large OAS files.
• Owlbot AI: Fixes issues with using keyboard shortcuts with Owlbot and improves a11y support.
• My Requests: Fix link to view all requests from the endpoint page appearing even if the feature is disabled.
• Auth: Fixed removing a teammate sometimes not correctly updating permissions for users already logged into the hub.

Your users can choose the log in to your docs via a link in their email, or by signing up with an email and password. ReadMe will now remember their login preference when logging in!

🪶 Other Improvements

• Owlbot AI: Owlbot now splits up embeddings into blocks—which means it does a better job handling pages with lots of content.
• Accessibility: We’ve made accessibility improvements to our code snippets, Owlbot AI, and the sidebar.

🐛 Bugs Eaten (by Owlbert)

• Owlbot AI: Fixed an issue where you couldn’t use the keyboard to navigate after focusing in Owlbot.
• Owlbot AI: Fixed an issue where Owlbot was unable to process requests using more powerful GPT models, when needed for additional context.
• Developer Dashboard: Fixed an issue where users could navigate to a broken page from an endpoint’s Recent Requests.
• Developer Dashboard: Fixed an issue where API requests weren't reliably populating in the docs.
• Suggested Edits: Fixed an issue where the page would crash when selecting text on a suggested edit.
• Dashboard: Fixed an issue with settings not being saved.
• Custom Pages: Fixed a potential security issue with custom pages.
• Login Page: Fixed an issue where 1-click login emails would show a warning banner in Gmail.

ReadMe now renders OAS file info in the Getting Started page! You can enable the Getting Started page from your dashboard: API Reference → Developer Dashboard → Getting Started.

🪶 Other Improvements

• Developer Dashboard: You’ll now be notified when making an export that exceeds our limits (it’s 1 million rows).
• Accessibility: We’ve made some subtle changes to our API Reference and navigation UI to increase contrast to a minimum of APCA Lc60.

🐛 Bugs Eaten (by Owlbert)

• Developer Dashboard: Fixed an issue with Getting Started and Authentication pages being deleted if the example endpoint is removed from the OAS file.
• Translations: Added more robust retry logic for reading content from translated pages, so that they can reliably appear in search results.
• API Reference: Fixed an issue with the manual API editor and the mixed type option not playing nicely with our SDK generator.
• API Reference: Fixed an issue where you couldn’t save changes in the manual API editor.

It's been a while since we've updated — we've been busy behind the scenes! And now the year might be winding down, but we’re not. We’re ending 2023 with a bang, having rolled out several updates recently, with a few things still left to share 👀

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though — here are the new features you can start using today:

Developer Dashboard 📊

Our latest feature announcement is the Developer Dashboard, which includes a veritable buffet of features:

• Automatically surfacing API keys for logged-in users
• Admin visibility into all of their developers’ API request history
• Easy access to API request logs, so developers can troubleshoot issues and view API usage for their API keys
• …and even more tools, all aimed at helping ReadMe users create the best developer experience possible 🏅

You can read more about Developer Dashboard here and check out the documentation for it here.

ReadMe Micro 🧱

We created ReadMe Micro to solve the problem of teams with hundreds (or thousands) of internal APIs and no easy way to organize or document them. Think of Micro as a developer hub for your engineering team: one centralized place to discover, organize, and share all your company’s internal APIs. Getting started is easy:

1. Select the repositories in your GitHub organization or Bitbucket workspace with the OpenAPI files you want documented
2. Connect those repositories with Micro, so it can auto-generate your new API Reference
3. Add some finishing touches — code samples, or a Markdown file with more information or helpful tips about the repository

Preview versions of your docs are generated for every PR and the continuous deployment includes built-in linting and validation, so you can catch errors before they make it to the final documentation.

There’s a lot more Micro can do, too — ranging from automatically updating documentation and creating a changelog, to searching and filtering docs by name, tags, or time synced.

You can read more about Micro here and check out the documentation for it here.

Owlbot AI 🤖

Last but not least, we’ve also rolled out Owlbot AI, a new way to improve your developer experience across your docs. Owlbot AI is trained on your documentation using the power of GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo. It goes a step further than keywords by “reading” the information in your developer hub and generating an answer based on that information, and then linking to the pages that the information was pulled from.

You can read more about Owlbot AI here and check out the documentation for it here.

In Other ReadMe News… 🗞️

We’ll have a booth at both GitHub Universe and AWS Re:Invent this year, so come find us to say hello! We love talking to our users. We’re also hosting a San Francisco meetup at Thriller Social Club on November 8th — you can RSVP here if you want to join us. Our last meetup in NYC was a blast and we’re looking forward to hosting more.

That’s all the news for this round — I’ll see you again in a few weeks for the next set of updates. Thanks for reading and being a part of the ReadMe community!

— Miche and the ReadMe team

📘

What is the Owlet Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Update—an owlet-sized update (posted to the ReadMe Changelog) on the product updates we're shipping here at ReadMe. We'd love to hear what you think of these updates at [email protected]!

Hello folks! If you're one of our loyal readers, you've probably seen our lack of activity on this feed and assumed that we've stopped shipping product updates. While I see you and I hear you, I'm happy to report that your sentiments are totally wrong and that we have been in fact quite busy on several fronts, including product updates — so much so that our trusty Changelog fell through the cracks. Apologies for that! But we're back with lots of exciting updates, which I'll dive into below 📼

That's a Wrap on Mixtape, Vol. 3 ✅

Last month, we celebrated all things API-related at the third volume of ReadMe’s API Mixtape in San Francisco. It was an evening designed for all who write, manage, market, and sell APIs. Speakers from 1Password, Twilio, and more shared their perspectives, and famed illusionist, Brett Schneider, concluded the event with a magical presentation full of surprises 🪄

Even if you couldn't join us live, we recorded the entire event and you can watch all of the sessions — including the magic show — here!

Product Announcements You Won’t Want to Miss 🚀

We also took API Mixtape as an opportunity to unveil two new features and a brand new product that are live now, or coming very soon, to your ReadMe dashboard and hub 🎉

• 📊 Developer Dashboard: Surface API keys and API request history data for your developers, and stay on top of your API's performance with the new My Developers page. You can learn more about the new experience here and watch the demo from API Mixtape below:

• 🔓 ReadMe Micro: Introducing a new solution for engineering teams looking to better organize and maintain their internal or microservice APIs. Sync the repos where your internal or microservice APIs are stored, and ReadMe Micro will organize and auto-generate documentation for them! As a ReadMe customer, sign up to start using ReadMe Micro for free until August 1st here and check out the demo from API Mixtape below:

• 🦉 Owlbot AI: Owlbot AI is a new chatbot that lives in your developer hub. Trained on your documentation using the power of OpenAI, developers can ask Owlbot questions about your product and get a response instantly. It’s your docs, made better and more powerful. Sign up for the waitlist so that you can be one of the first to enable Owlbot AI in your docs (we've already started rolling this out!) and watch a demo of Owlbot AI below:

That's "owl" for now, folks! As always, thanks for being a part of the ReadMe community.

—Kanad and the ReadMe team

📘

What is the Owlet Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Update—an owlet-sized update (posted to the ReadMe Changelog) on the product updates we're shipping here at ReadMe. We'd love to hear what you think of these updates at [email protected]!

Happy Rihanna Pisces season folks! We're cooking up more resources in partnership with our friends at AWS and totally revamping the experience of suggesting an edit. Oh and did I mention that we're rolling out the biggest improvements to the dashboard sidebar since the beginning of ReadMe? Lots of exciting stuff, y'all — onward! ♓

• New Sidebar & Page Controls Experience (Beta) 🍫 API documentation encompasses far more than just writing it. It also requires a good bit of organization — everything from managing categories, pages, and subpages to maintaining versions, keeping content and visuals up-to-date, and more. That’s why we’ve fully redesigned the sidebar and page navigation in the dashboard to make creating, editing, and organizing pages in your Guides and API Reference even easier! If you’d like to join the beta and get early access to this new experience, you can sign up here. And be sure to check out our docs for full details on the experience.

• Major edits to Suggested Edits 📝 in what started out as one of Rafe's side projects turned into a completely modernized Suggested Edits experience — both from a UI and a performance standpoint. Head over to our updated doc on the subject to see this in action.

• More AWS Resources 🤝 since announcing our partnership with AWS last fall, we've hosted a couple webinars and recently published a video that walks through the process of setting up the Amazon API Gateway integrations end-to-end. If you missed any of this and want to learn more about how AWS and ReadMe are thinking about developer experience, check out our webinar recap! And tune in to our walkthrough video below (or if you prefer a written walkthrough, check out this post on the AWS blog) if you want to get started with the integrations.

That's "owl" for now, folks! As always, thanks for being a part of the ReadMe community.

—Owlbert and the ReadMe team

📘

What is the Owlet Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Update—an owlet-sized update (posted to the ReadMe Changelog) on the product updates we're shipping here at ReadMe. We'd love to hear what you think of these updates at [email protected]!

Whew, January really flew by there, didn't it? We've stayed busy this last month, bringing two exciting features to our Enterprise customers and a bunch of little quality-of-life improvements across several aspects of ReadMe. Oh, and the occasional livestream or two. More below! 🌱

• Dark mode for Enterprise 🌚 we've been talking non-stop about dark mode in the last few Owlet Updates, and for good reason — it's been one of our most requested features for years! Well we're proud to announce that the dark mode toggle is now available for all ReadMe plans. Check out our docs to get it set up for your developer hub!

• Personalized Docs for Enterprise 🪝 like dark mode above, Personalized Docs probably sounds familiar, but now developer hubs across all ReadMe plans can set up the Personalized Docs Webhook. Once you've set it up, your users will be able to browse their API keys and quickly make authenticated calls right from the docs — a great way to level-up your developer experience! Head over to our docs to learn more.

• ReadMe API improvements 🧱 this month included a variety of improvements and fixes for users of the ReadMe API. We've added a few new parameters (categorySlug and parentDocSlug), which should make it easier to sync Markdown files at scale via our Docs API. We also fixed a gnarly bug where API reference pages were occasionally getting shuffled around on subsequent re-syncs.
• Other little big details ✨ nothing specific to call out here, but we also shipped little quality-of-life improvements to some of the features you probably use on a daily basis: translations 🌐, search 🔍, and authentication 🔑 (and likely a few others that I didn't mention).
• Amazon API Gateway integrations (and a couple livestreams!) 🤝 since announcing our partnership with AWS, we've released a couple of integrations: 1) one to keep your Amazon API Gateway configuration in sync with your ReadMe docs, and 2) one to deploy the Personalized Docs Webhook to AWS Lambda. We're also hosting a few chats with the Amazon team — we had one last week and we have one coming up in a few weeks (that I'm going to be a part of)! We'll be diving deeper into the integrations we’ve built and answering all of your burning questions about how to create the best DX possible. You can read more about the event and register to attend here. Even if you can’t attend live, make sure to register so that you get a link to the recording after the event!

That's "owl" for now, folks! As always, thanks for being a part of the ReadMe community.

—Kanad and the ReadMe team

📘

What is the Owlet Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Update—an owlet-sized update (posted to the ReadMe Changelog) on the product updates we're shipping here at ReadMe. We'd love to hear what you think of these updates at [email protected]!

Hello and Happy New Year to all! Welcome to our first update of 2023, recapping all the December goodness. We've had a lot of folks out for the holidays, but that didn't stop us from shipping several exciting updates last month, particularly on the rdme front. More below! 🎁

• Global Landing Page Improvements 🌍 with November's knowledge base revamp, you may have noticed our beautiful new global landing page (courtesy of Tony)! We want to make sure everyone can create a beautiful global landing page for their Enterprise Group with ease. We've shipped lots of little improvements on this front, including revamped Theme Editor settings, improved dark mode support and improved mobile-friendless. If you want to upgrade to the new global landing page, get in touch with your PXM!

• New OpenAPI tools in rdme 🛠️ in the last few weeks, we shipped a slew of rdme releases. The highlights include a couple new commands to help you manage your OpenAPI definition: openapi:inspect and openapi:convert. The former performs a thorough analysis of your definition to help you understand what aspects of the OpenAPI Specification that your file utilizes, while the latter converts Swagger and Postman definitions to OpenAPI. Oh, and rdme also automatically handles GitHub blob URLs now!

• Securely authenticate into the ReadMe CLI with 1Password 🔑 as of [email protected] and above, you can store your ReadMe API key in 1Password and securely pass it in your rdme commands via biometric authentication, like Touch ID! Check out the 1Password documentation to learn how to set this up and see it in action below:

• Kicking off our new series, "Behind the Docs" ✍️ at ReadMe, we think a lot about creating a great experience for developers building with our customers’ APIs. But we care a lot about the folks responsible for those APIs, too! That's why we’re excited to kick off our first “Behind the Docs" user Q&A — giving you a closer look not just at how they’re using ReadMe, but at their career learnings, perspective on working with APIs, and favorite growth resources. For our first post in the series, we chat with Beth Favini, Senior Director of Product Documentation at Couchbase. The full discussion is now available on our blog.
• Helping your users write simpler API Calls with api 🚀 we’re always looking for new ways to make APIs more accessible and lower the on-ramp to getting started. We closed out the calendar year by sharing more about "api", our open-source SDK generator. Read more on our blog.
• Other holiday treats 🎁 we also wrapped up the year with several exciting shout-outs and accolades, both for us and our customers:
  • We received a surprise shout-out in Dr. Vogels's keynote at AWS re:Invent (see below for the video!) 📣
  • We made Y Combinator's list of Top 50 YC Startups Hiring Now 🔥
  • We were recognized in the Winter G2 Awards across several categories 💙
  • And last but certainly not least, Fiserv recently won the 2022 DevPortal Award for Best API Reference Documentation 🏆 congrats y'all!

That's "owl" for now, folks! Excited for what's to come in 2023 👀

—Kanad and the ReadMe team

📘

What is the Owlet Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Update—an owlet-sized update (posted to the ReadMe Changelog) on the product updates we're shipping here at ReadMe. We'd love to hear what you think of these updates at [email protected]!