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Owlet Weekly Update (Week of February 15)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update! I know I keep teasing it, but we're hard at work on several new ReadMe experiences and improvements that we'll be sharing news on very soon. But the wins are not just long-term, folks! This week includes a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements so our engineers can build and ship much faster (hello, npm 7!) and we also shipped a few small wins on the API Explorer and Firefox front. Details below! 🦊

✨ New & Improved

  • This release includes lots of little improvements to the API Explorer—more secure Ruby code snippets, better rendering of response array parameter descriptions, and improved support for content declarations! Oh, and we got rid of array keys in the response renderer in a desperate (but successful!) effort to declutter our lives. 🧹
  • White text on a white background is very difficult to read, y'all—would strongly advise against it. Apologies if you previously had to do so when applying for an open source plan in the dashboard. 🏳️

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • There was an issue where document fragment links weren't properly navigating to the correct section for select users on Firefox. Well we're cranking the Van Halen up to 11 in this week's release in hopes that Firefox browsers will "jump!" to the correct section. 🤘
  • Several tiny URL fixes in the project dashboard for enterprise projects that are using Staging. 🔗

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every week 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]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of February 8)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update! As mentioned last week, we were at our 90s themed offsite last week (see below for a glimpse into the chaos), so this week's update is a bit on the lighter side. We've been working on some bigger features and initiatives that we'll have news about very soon, but in the meantime we fixed a few bugs in the reference section and the dashboard (among other things). Details below! 💽

✨ New & Improved

  • In small but nevertheless notable updates to the HTML: we've added a little utility CSS class, userLoggedIn, to the root of the document (i.e. <html>) in the Hubs, for use in your Custom JavaScript and CSS. Please be nice y'all! userLoggedIn is new around here and is a bit shy. 🎨

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • You may have noticed at some point today that you were logged out of all of your ReadMe Hubs. Apologies for that—we made some tiny security improvements to our session management. Nothing to see here folks, carry on! 🔐
  • Various bug fixes and improvements related to the massive behind-the-scenes optimizations we made in the hubs a couple weeks ago.
  • Minor error-handling and performance improvements when loading certain Reference guides. 🚀
  • Removing some UI quirks that users were occasionally seeing when creating projects in the dashboard. 🚮

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every week 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]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of February 1)

Hi there! Thanks for tuning into another weekly update. This week we're feeding our Tamagotchis and blasting Semisonic's Secret Smile (their best song according to one person at ReadMe that clearly did not grow up in the United States) in honor of our 90s themed offsite that's happening all week! We're also shipping parameter examples in the API Explorer and making sure everything checks out with our health checks. Details below! 🎸

✨ New & Improved

  • This week, we're shipping some major behind-the-scenes improvements to our forms in the API Explorer. This fixes a bunch of little quirks in our OpenAPI/JSON Schema handling, but more importantly, it adds support for the example and examples keywords in parameters and request bodies (we've supported examples in response bodies for a bit now, for the record!). In other words, you can now specify example parameters for your users to grab when constructing API requests. They'll be able to preview your examples via an input placeholder and select one of them from a dropdown list. Still confused? Check out a demo here! 📚
  • The API Explorer gifts just keep on giving—so much so that they're spilling into a second bullet point! We're also shipping some big performance improvements to the API Explorer, namely in how we handle dereferencing for large OpenAPI files. What does this mean? Substantially improved loading times, particularly for those of you with literally thousands (... thousands...) of endpoints. 🚀
  • Various bundling improvements and caching improvements for static assets so your users have a faster experience loading your docs. 📦
  • Design and readability improvements to the user agents in the API Metrics Dashboard. 💅

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • Health checks weren't doing a great job at the whole "checking" thing (in other words, they weren't properly loading in the Hubs), which is basically their only job. Thankfully, this release brings 'em back. ✔️

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of January 25)

Hello and welcome to another Owlet Weekly Update! We've been full steam ahead on some major changes to our front-end architecture (which we've previously alluded to) and we couldn't be more excited about it. While I currently don't have any updates on that front (stay tuned! 👀)... what better way to ring in Aquarius season than with audit log improvements? It makes sense if you don't think about it. Details below! ♒

🚧

Release Delays

If you're an avid follower of our Changelog feed, you may have noticed that the publish date on this post was January 27th and that this post was published, unpublished, and then subsequently republished on February 3rd! Unfortunately, we ran into a couple of hiccups deploying this release—check out our status page for a full rundown of the ordeal. But I'm happy to report that this release did eventually go out around 8pm PST on February 2nd with everything listed below. Apologies for the hiccups and thanks so much for your patience with this release, folks!

✨ New & Improved

  • When a lot of people can edit your organization's website content, it's important to have an audit log so it's easy to track who is making changes. If you don't believe me, ask Mike Pompeo. Thankfully, ReadMe has great audit log support and this release takes our audit log feature a step further—with support for changes to your documentation that are made via the ReadMe API.
  • This release kicks off a series of massive behind-the-scenes optimizations to how we load data into the Hub. This means a reduced memory footprint when making requests, meaning a faster and lighter documentation experience for you and your users. Stay tuned for more updates on this front! 🚀

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • When writing a new post in the discussion forums, we perform a little search that shows potentially related posts that may answer your question. There's been an issue where these suggestions were missing some critical content and the links weren't even working. Yikes! While that's great if you are in desperate need of affirmation that you are a unique individual with unique needs, it's not so great if you're trying to find some related posts in the discussion forum. Thankfully, this release fixes those issues so you can properly find fellow keyboard warriors in the fight to get ReadMe to support GraphQL. ⌨️
  • Safari desktop users, you matter. I really mean that. All six of you! You can rest easy knowing that we've tweaked a couple of margins (just for you!) in the API Metrics Dashboard. 🧭
  • A few bug fixes and security updates to RDMD. ✍️
  • Some minor linking improvements in the Dash. 🔗

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday-ish to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of January 18)

Hello and happy Wednesday! Despite this week being a short one (did you take some time to read up on the history of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day?), it's been busy both nationally and locally. On our end, we've been hard at work finding ways to improve the ReadMe experience. We hear that's true for the rest of the country as well! 📈 More details on our efforts below.

✨ New & Improved

  • You might want to forget recent history on a larger scale, but here at ReadMe we want to make sure you have all the history you need. To that end, we've added Page History to Changelogs and Custom Pages. We've also added a Created By event so that any new page you create from now on will let you know who's responsible! ✏️

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • Made some fixes to make sure the save button in the dash works the way you expect 🔨
  • Fixed an issue that was causing certain headers not to display as expected in the table of contents. You should feel free to go crazy with those headers now! 😎
  • Some improvements on the API Explorer side to make sure everything that needs to render is rendering and all links are going to where they should 👓
  • Solved some Enterprise-specific issues with PDFs downloading to make sure everybody gets the files they need! 📂
  • Fixed a problem with 404 pages so that deleting a custom one no longer triggers an infinite loop! ➿

As always, thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks!

—Naomi and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of January 11)

Hello and happy Tuesday! Despite all the doom-scrolling we did last week, we're shipping parameter serialization and bringing our redesigned search experience to even more people. Details below!

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✨ New & Improved

  • There's been an explosive development with respect to our API explorer—support for the style and explode parameters! That's right folks, our reference sections officially support parameter serialization. For those of you that are curious, check out a demo here! 💥
  • This release includes a few UX wins in the project dashboard—clicking things take you to where they should go, buttons are disabled when they should be disabled, and sidebars that should scroll actually scroll! 🖱️
  • Great news for our dear mobile users—the search for the search icon is finally over. Now users of all screen shapes and sizes get to take advantage of our redesigned search experience from last year! 📱

🛠 Fixes & Updates

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks! Please take care of yourselves.

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of January 4)

New Year, New Owlet Weekly Update! This week's update is on the shorter side because we spent the holidays in one of several categories: 1) sleeping and/or watching the Paddington movies, 2) implementing a lot of behind-the-scenes code improvements on our 2020 resolutions list that we've been putting off, or 3) discovering steam from a hot shower destroyed everything in an apartment. Nevertheless, we did ship some exciting updates to the API Metrics Dashboard and made some improvements to our "toasts" to ring in the New Year 🥂 details below!

✨ New & Improved

  • This release includes a bunch of little improvements to the API Metrics Dashboard—initial loading improvements, filtering improvements, and an API Users section that loads approximately one-million percent faster than before. 🚀

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • There was a glaring issue where our toast message container (i.e. the little popup in the bottom-right corner that pops up when making certain changes in the dashboard) was occasionally overlapping with our Intercom widget. Well, it's time to give our toast message container a little more space. If you're reading this, toast message container, just know that it's not you, it's us. 🍞
  • Tiny fixes to custom HTML in Landing Pages. 🏠

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community, folks! Let's make 2021 a good (or better, at least) one.

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of December 14)

Hello and welcome to another weekly update! To wrap up this chaotic year, we bring you Slack integration improvements and some extra coats of polish throughout the product. Oh, and good tidings, I suppose? Details below! 🎄

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"Alexa find me a non-denominational holiday Owlbert" *no results found*

📘

Programming Note

Due to the upcoming extended holiday, this will be our last release of 2020! On a personal note, thanks so much (to all three? maybe four? of you) for taking the time to read these! In what was an otherwise terrible year for basically all of us, being able to regularly and publicly rave about the amazing things my team builds has been a real joy. We'll be back the week of January 4th with some very exciting news—stay tuned!

✨ New & Improved

  • We’ve released some huuuuge improvements to our Slack integration with new ways to access the powerful insights that API Metrics has to offer—in the form of new slash commands and a weekly summary digest! You can access insights about your API usage like Top Users, Top Endpoints, and Recent Logs via a slash command. And if you’re too lazy to type words into Slack, the integration will post weekly summaries of your API usage into a Slack channel of your choice! 📊
  • In anticipation of our sedentary lifestyles over the holidays, we’ve further slashed away at the bundles that load the project dashboard and your documentation sites. Faster load times and lighter pages for us, everyone! 🔪

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • Good news for you dashboard power users—we’ve made some UI optimizations so you can now furiously alternate between editing and reordering pages without interruptions! 🦸
  • We’ve made subtle alignment tweaks to the HTTP methods throughout the project dashboard and your documentation sites. GETs, POSTs, and PUTs have never looked better! 📏
  • This release includes a couple little usability upgrades in the sidebar—design improvements for pages with longer titles, collapsibility tweaks, and some scroll fixes! 🖱️

As always, thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community. Wishing you and your loved ones a safe and enjoyable holidays!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of December 7)

Thanks for tuning into another Owlet Weekly Update! This week we're improving dashboard loading times 🚀, shipping zero-config(!) API Metrics 🌱, paying homage to a (scarily relevant) synth-pop music video from the mid-2000s 🎹, and so much more. Let's dive in!

✨ New & Improved

  • In most aspects of life, you reap what you sow. There’s no greater example of that than our API Metrics platform—if you take a little bit of time to plant the seeds (the API Metrics proxy or middleware), they will yield a bountiful harvest (a greater understanding of your API users). Well what if you could reap (in a good way!) without doing any sowing? That’s right folks… we’re officially launching Zero-Configuration API Metrics! We’ll have more to say about this soon, but the long story short is that all interactions with your API reference section will now produce API Metrics usage data, meaning that you now get a preview of the insights that API Metrics has to offer with zero setup or configuration! If you like what you see and you decide that you want these insights for every user that interacts with your API, you’re always welcome to plant a few seeds. 🌱
  • Great news folks—we now support 3OH!3! Whoops sorry—what is this, the mid-2000s? What I meant to say is that we now support Version 3.0.3 of the OpenAPI specification! And not only that—going forward, all API definitions that are written in our manual editor are now compiled into 3.0.3! The only downside of all of this is that it’s very unlikely that I’ll be able to drop such a topical reference for future versions of the OpenAPI spec. 🎹
  • As we continue to build out our OpenAPI support in the API Explorer, it sometimes takes a bit longer to extend certain things to our dear manual API editor users. Well I've good news for y’all: we just added enum support to our manual editor, meaning that reference sections of all creeds can now have their users select parameters from a dropdown list of values! ✅
  • Sometimes when loading up a project in the ReadMe dashboard, you may be like me and occasionally use that generous chunk of time to refill your coffee cup, do some laundry, or walk the dog. Well I’m afraid you’re going to adjust your schedule… because we’ve made some significant improvements to our dashboard loading times! 🚀
  • This release lays some of the groundwork for upcoming performance improvements to the API Explorer, particularly for you crazy kids out there with massive API definitions. Stay tuned! 🚄
  • A few more small improvements to an extremely exciting upcoming ReadMe feature that we have a lot more to say about soon! 🧑‍🍳

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • Much like most of us during quarantine, there were a few specific cases where documentation sidebar links were having trouble staying active. While we can’t afford to give everybody a Pelaton in this release, it does fix the styling on these sidebar links. 👟
  • Huge developments in the society’s conversation around callout culture: we were seeing an issue where certain Markdown callouts were missing their body text. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately, depending on your feelings about callout culture), we’ve restored the body text of these callouts. 🗣️
  • A few content width improvements for folks that like to live dangerously (i.e. people that look at API documentation on their phone). 📱
  • We added scrollbars to a couple places that needed them, and hid them in places where you didn’t need to see them. 👀
  • A handful of little reliability improvements to our code blocks. 🧱
  • Tiny improvements to how we bundle OpenAPI documents. 📦
  • A few reliability improvements to our PDF generation. 🖨️

Thanks again for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!

Owlet Weekly Update (Week of November 30)

Hello and happy Tuesday Thursday—hope you had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday! To offset the absolutely devastating amount of pumpkin pie I consumed last week, we’ve reduced the size of our site bundles, along with a bunch of other good stuff(ing?). Details below! 🥧

✨ New & Improved

  • From the people that brought you dash.readme.io comes its equally entertaining sequel—dash.readme.com! You’ve been able to access the project dashboard via dash.readme.com for a while, but you may have noticed your web browser redirecting to the new URL in the last couple weeks. And rest assured, your requests to the ReadMe API should work as normal for the foreseeable future! 🔗
  • Much like preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, preparing an OpenAPI file can be a grueling process that often requires a helping hand. Fortunately, we’ve made a small update to our API onboarding process that makes it even easier to get in touch with our incredible support team! (EDITOR’S NOTE: Please do not contact our support team with your turkey-related inquiries. But if you have a story about your turkey-making experiences this year, tweet at us!) 🤝
  • Hey, have you heard about our latest and greatest enterprise feature—Staging? You should definitely hit us up to try it out! We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on it and have been making a lot of great improvements behind the scenes. This release includes some of those! 🌱
  • As alluded to above, we’ve slashed away at the size of our main bundle that’s loaded in on all documentation sites (with more updates to come in the future!). What does that mean? Faster, lighter pages for your users! ⚡
  • A few readability improvements to our Node.js code samples in the API Explorer. 🤓

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • Don’t you hate when Google Maps navigates you to your local post office, only for you to pull up to a fenced off building that’s been fully burned to the ground for months? Well fun (and 100% true) fact: that happened to me a few weeks ago here in Minneapolis! In the spirit of Google Maps (which continues to insist that that post office exists and is open despite the feedback I've submitted), I can happily report that this release includes a fix to an issue where certain URLs in ReadMe would 301 instead of 404. Sorry for the misdirection, folks! 🗺️
  • A couple of tiny updates to the API logs to make them a little friendlier to response bodies that don’t exactly conform to the JSON way of life (in other words… response bodies that aren’t JSON). 🧬
  • Not everyone on our team can be on Shinae’s level, unfortunately. As with releases of yore, this one includes fixes to a few glaring spelling and grammar issues in some of our product copy. ✏️
  • Improvements to some of the number-crunching that takes place in the API Metrics Dashboard. 📈

If you haven't already, please take some time to learn about Indigenous rights and the National Day of Mourning. And if you can, please support the Indigenous-led fight to Stop Line 3. Thanks for tuning in and for being a part of the ReadMe community!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update—an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!