Hello and happy Tuesday, folks! This release is a bit on the lighter side (along with several releases going forward—see the programming note below), but just because it's light doesn't mean that it isn't substantial! (For evidence of this: see salad with chickpeas.) This week, we're shipping custom login setup improvements and navigational fixes. Details below! 🥗

📘Programming Note

As alluded to above, our release cycles (and correspondingly, the Owlet Weekly Updates™) will be a bit lighter for the next 1-2 months (and this timeline may or may not be a direct result of the fact that our CEO is a triple Aries...). We'll be mostly focused on some major upgrades to our API Reference and I couldn't be more excited. We'll still be posting here on a regular basis with any product updates that go out in the meantime—stay tuned! ♈

✨ New & Improved

• This release includes a couple of updates to the custom login setup page in the dashboard. We've converted the sample code into a RunKit embed, so you can run the Node.js code sample and see the output directly within the dashboard. We also moved some things around to eliminate some of the custom login confusion for enterprise groups. 🧹

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• We're bringing back the back button, y'all! For certain Firefox users in the hub, clicking the browser's back button would update the URL but wouldn't actually navigate back to the previous page. A bit disorienting for people that are used to the back button actually working properly (i.e. literally everyone). Happy to report that the functionality is... back! (Confession: in writing this up, the word "back" has lost all meaning to me.) 🔙
• Fixed an issue where the sample starter code wasn't being populated in the Custom OAuth settings. 🔑
• Fixed a bug where custom section names weren't being reflected in the Search modal. 🔍

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

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

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]!

What's this? Two posts in a single week? Well folks, we occasionally do smaller releases outside of our regular release cycle—usually to fix bugs that may have cropped up in the last release. We're going to try and provide better transparency about these smaller hotfix releases in a new segment that's tentatively called The Owlbert Patch! We just shipped a tiny release that includes a couple of glaring issues with the API Explorer that have been plaguing us for a while. Details below!

• A couple weeks ago, we introduced discriminators into the mix! We later discovered issues if these didn't strictly match the OpenAPI specification, which caused errors in the API Explorer. This patch release includes a fix to give folks more flexibility in how they define the discriminators! 🧱
• Certain reference sections weren't properly scrolling down to the right section when hash links (like this one) were included in the URL. We've fixed that in this release! 🖱️

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

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

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]!

Hello and happy March, folks! The arrival of March brings us lots of things—a bleak reckoning with the fact that we (at least those of us in the US) have been dealing with this pandemic for about a year now, but also longer and warmer days (for the most part). And y'all—climate science isn't alone in bringing sunshine and warmth into your lives! This week, we're shipping instant cache invalidation, Google Analytics 4 support, and lots of other little fixes and improvements. Details below! 🌞

✨ New & Improved

• Don't you hate it when you do something and the effects of those changes aren't immediate? In this case, I'm referring to my dying plants and my desperate attempts to bring them back to life, but this can also apply to web pages that are served through a content delivery network (like ours)! While CDNs are great because they make for far faster experiences when using the web, it may take some time for your users to see content changes reflected in their browsers. But what if we could get the best of both worlds? Well this release includes instant cache validation—meaning that whenever you update page content, we purge the cache on Cloudflare, meaning that your users will instantly see your latest and greatest content. 🌱
• Last year, we got deep into our quarantine feelings and enhanced our API errors with a few (and by that I mean over 30) poems. Well it's been a long time coming, but they're finally making their way back around to several places where you create API definitions in the dashboard. This will hopefully lead to less confusion when getting your OpenAPI file set up with ReadMe! 🖋️
• Great news for our Enterprise users (but bad news for people that like to make sneaky updates to the Global Landing Page): whenever someone makes a change to the Global Landing Page, those changes will now be documented in the Audit Logs! 🌐
• As of this release, you can now integrate your developer hub with Google Analytics 4! We also made this easy—to upgrade to GA4, you can simply update the property in the integrations settings in the dashboard. 📊

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• Certain projects were sending out Slack and email notifications for Suggested Edits that contained broken links. Sorry y'all. While we wish we could go back in time and fix all those emails and Slack messages, that'd be both difficult and slightly invasive. Fortunately, this release includes a fix so links should be fixed in future notifications! 🔗
• Several small improvements in the API Explorer, including bundle improvements, more readable JavaScript fetch code samples, and better handling of raw JSON. 🤓
• A couple of user data fixes for users that were unable to see their API logs from within the hub for projects utilizing zero-configuration API metrics. 🎫
• This release fixes an issue where project administrators were unable to select custom pages when configuring links in the Top Navigation bar. 🧭
• Fixed an issue for certain enterprise projects where project administrators were unable to properly preview unpublished API reference pages. 👀
• Minor performance improvements in the API Metrics Dashboard. 🚀

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

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

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]!

Hello and happy Pisces season (the best time of the year, according to... nobody), friends! ♓ It's only fair that we ring in the majestic season of the fish with an overly emotional tribute to some code that we deleted this week. We're also shipping support for discriminators (not the kind that you're thinking of, probably) in the API Explorer, as well as several performance and design improvements. Details below! 🐟

✨ New & Improved

• Great news for you polymorphism enthusiasts out there—this week, we're shipping support for discriminators in the form input that constructs request bodies in the API Explorer! You can see a demo of the functionality here. 🧱
• This release includes some tweaks to our strategy for initially serving our JavaScript bundles to your users. This means faster page loads when users stumble across your documentation for the very first time (since their subsequent requests are cached most of the time). A performance gain is a performance gain, folks—no matter how specific! 🏁
• We've given the API log a new paint job (both in the hub and dashboard)! Now it's easier than ever to view the request and response info and to share the log with others. Curious to see the new look? Check out a sample log here! 🎨
• Slight design tweaks to get our Changelog title headers in line with other sections—can you notice the difference? ☝️

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• As alluded to above, we’re parting ways with the old code that originally fueled the flame of our beloved API Explorer. I won't mince words here, y'all: this code walked so our current React component could run. This legacy code has remained a thorn in our sides (and in our hearts ❤️) for several years now while our current React component implementation has been running the show. While this code removal won't provide any material improvements to your reference documentation experience, we hope you keep those 3,980 lines of code in your thoughts during this difficult time. 🕯️
• Some developments in the global conversation surrounding callout culture: this time in the form of tiny padding fixes for lists within Markdown callouts. (Related, but not really: adrienne maree brown recently came out with a book on the topic!) 🗣️
• Minor URL fixes for Suggested Edits in the dashboard. 🔗

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

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

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]!

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

📘

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]!

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

📘

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]!

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

📘

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]!

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

📘

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]!

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

📘

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]!

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!

✨ 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

• Fixed an issue where search functionality was degraded for password-protected projects. 🔍
• A few more coats of polish and bug fixes in the API Metrics Dashboard. 📈
• Even more tiny improvements to custom HTML in Landing Pages. 🏠

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

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

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]!