Hello and happy Leo season to those who celebrate! It's only reasonable that I come to you in the bold season of the Lion with some bold updates to ReadMe — well fear not! 🦁 This week includes many bold(-ish... it's all relative, I suppose!) updates, including links to API logs in every response, SSR for our Markdown engine, and a whole lot more. Details below! ♌️

✨New & Improved

• A couple weeks ago, we announced some sweeping improvements to the ReadMe API's error responses, including a unique link to an API log in every error response (powered by API Metrics!). We just expanded upon this in a substantial way—now every response from the ReadMe API includes a x-documentation-url header that includes a link to the API log in the ReadMe API documentation. But that's not all! The latest versions of our API Metrics SDKs include this response header enhancement as well. In other words, you can easily connect your API to ReadMe and users will see this x-documentation-url response header and will be able to access their API logs within your documentation! We think this will be a serious game changer for anybody that's looking to elevate their API experience. Check out our docs to learn how to connect your API to ReadMe and get this set up! 🏀
• This release includes a major performance milestone for our Markdown engine—server-side rendering! What does this mean? We now pre-render Markdown on the server, which lets us deliver lighter bundles, and translates to increased performance and faster loads for developers down the line! 🚀
• Good news for all you iPad, Fire HD, Galaxy Tab (yes, all two of you who read API docs on your Galaxy Tab), and any other tablet users out there—no more awkward spacing when looking at our guides! Responsive design improvements have been made all across the board, most notably in the sidebar and footer. (Any better ideas for a tablet emoji?) 💻 / 📱
• Various search improvements, including indexing improvements and linking improvements for Enterprise projects and projects with multiple versions and/or languages. 🔍
• Even our users of ReadMe Free deserve nice things! Including the ability to transfer project ownership. Starting today, you can! Hooray for nice things! 🤝
• Various coloring improvements on the new search modal to further ensure that it matches your project's color scheme. 🎨
• For projects with split API Reference sections, the sidebar will now properly scroll when selecting a different section! 🖱️
• Added preliminary support in the API Explorer for circular references in OpenAPI documents. If you know, you know. 🔄
• Minor spacing improvements in the API Reference section. 💄

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• Remember how last week we proudly declared victory over grammar failure in our call-to-action buttons? Well as it turns out, we missed a few spots. Welp. You may notice more "Login" ➡️ "Log In" updates in this release. Grammar is important, folks! 🤓
• We were seeing a mysterious issue where if you created multiple page categories that have the same name, you may see weird issues like the inability to delete categories and even disappearing pages. Yikes! Happy to report that we identified the root issue and included a fix in this release. 👻
• For the last couple weeks or so, you may have noticed a brief flash of incorrect, or duplicated content when initially loading the sidebar on certain projects. No, it wasn't just your imagination! Thankfully, this release includes a fix which should put your mind (and sidebar) at ease. ⚡
• We saw an issue affecting a small percentage of API Reference sections where our cache was causing pages to only partially load, causing them to look a little funky (to put it lightly). Happy to report that this has been fixed! 🕺🏽
• Fixes to a save issue in the project dashboard affecting a small percentage of pages. 💾
• Minor fixes to our email notifications. ✉️
• Other minor design tweaks and stability improvements. 💄
• And last but not least... we finally eradicated a tiny but nevertheless oft-mentioned (internally, at least) annoyance when creating a project on ReadMe—the requirement to upload a logo! Now, when you don't upload a logo, we just backfill the sample ReadMe logo for you, rather than requiring the additional click to do so. It's all about the big little details, folks! 💫

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

(Major shout-outs go out to our resident Owlbert cartoonistPaul Cox for creating our Owlet Weekly Update image! And also to Greg for building out a headline generator on top of the image so I can continue to keep these updates weird.)

—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]!

- Welcome to the Owlet Weekly Update for the Week of July 13!
+ Welcome to the Owlet Weekly Update for the Week of July 20!

Another week, another weekly update! This week's release bore many small fruit, including diff language support in our code blocks (as demonstrated above), fixes to several glaring spelling and grammatical errors, and many other small improvements and fixes. Read on for the details! 🍓

✨ New & Improved

• As part of our *ahem* massive Search improvements, did you know that you can trigger the new Search modal on any page by pressing ⌘ + K on macOS or ^ + K on other platforms (e.g. Windows, Linux)? Well for those of you that fall in the latter category, that's been a bit confusing thus far since the search bar previously indicated that it was ⌘ + K for all platforms. Happy to report that we render the Command or Control key based your platform. 💻
• A couple of small design touch-ups, primarily to ensure our icon updates from last week are reflected everywhere. 💄
• Added support for diff syntax highlighting in our code blocks. 🎨
• Our rdme command line tool now takes advantage of our improved API error responses. 🚀
• Responsive polish in the guides and reference sections. 📱
• We gave the Owlbert emoji a new look! You can use it by typing :owlbert: into your docs. If you haven't already, check out our ReadMe Markdown docs for more info.

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• As you may have heard last week, we made some huge improvements to the ReadMe API, including a link to an API log in every error response! We noticed issues with how our API logs were constructing sample cURL for certain requests (as well as a few spelling errors in our API error poems). This release includes some major reliability improvements to our API logs, as well as some desperately-needed fixes to the spelling errors. 🖋️
• Fun fact: Log In is a verb, whereas Login is a noun. And turns out we've had that mixed up in some of our copy for... probably years. This was probably bugging many of you grammar nerds (including our very own Copy Queen, Shinae—thanks for the catch!). We appreciate your restraint and the lack of Twitter callouts. 🤓
• There was a tiny issue on certain pages in the Enterprise project dashboard where we were displaying black text on a black background. Turns out that severely limits one's ability to write Custom CSS and JavaScript. Please rejoice — this has been fixed and you can now view your own code! 🧑‍💻
• As part of our addition of diff syntax highlighting, we noticed a little quirk where switching between certain languages in the code editor may not actually update the code's syntax highlighting correctly. This release also includes a fix to that. 🔄
• Various small improvements in the API Explorer, including better support for default in the OpenAPI Responses object and minor fixes to how we handle x-www-form-urlencoded payloads. 📦
• Fixed a bug in the Manual API Editor where defining default values wouldn't be reflected in the API reference section. ✏️
• Several minor security fixes including to an issue where changes to a user's project permissions weren't immediately taking effect in their current session. 🔐
• Minor clean-up in the API error response objects that we updated last week. 🧹

Thanks again for being a part of the ReadMe community!

—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]!

🎉

Welcome to another update!
We have exciting news to share.
This week, we updated the ReadMe API
To include poems with every err'!

Alas, I'm not nearly as good at writing poems as Greg (our CEO) is — who literally wrote over 30 unique poems for each and every error code that is returned from the ReadMe HTTP API! 🖋️

In other non-poetry-related (but nevertheless exciting) news, we also shipped some exciting updates to our icons, made a ton of usability improvements to our GitHub integration, and lots more. More information below!

✨ New & Improved

• As mentioned above, we made some huge improvements to our API errors. Now, when you receive an error from the ReadMe HTTP API, the response object will include links to API logs, better descriptions of the error, and of course... a poem! 🖋️ Try sending the following cURL request in your terminal and observe the response:

  Shell

  curl --location --request GET 'https://dash.readme.com/api/v1' \
      --header 'Authorization: Basic T3dsZXQgV2Vla2x5IFVwZGF0ZTo='

• This hopefully won't be nearly as controversial as the great Slack logo change of January 2019 (we ALL had opinions on that), but we gave some of our icons a fresh redesign! Our design team wanted to create a set of icons that are simpler, more consistent, and that hopefully feel more relevant to the use case (it's an API Reference section, not an audio mixer!) — check out the changes below and let us know what you think. 🎨

• If you were following our Changelog this past Halloween, you'll recall that we shipped a GitHub integration in large part because we wanted to share this image. While I don't have any culturally relevant images to share this time around (and honestly if I did, they'd be quite bleak), I'm excited to announce some big improvements to our GitHub Action: A beautiful new onboarding flow in the dashboard and a vastly simplified workflow configuration file! Check out our updated article in the docs for more info. 🎃
• We're so close to the end of this gradual rollout of our new search feature y'all... So close! We just did an additional rollout of these search improvements to even more projects today. If you haven't already, please let us know what you think at [email protected]! 🔍

🛠 Fixes & Updates

• With the announcement of ReadMe Free, we've seen a lot of new interest — which has been very exciting! However, there was a bug where if you selected the Free plan, it was impossible to switch back to your trial. We also added some in-product clarification about what features are available during the trial versus in the Free plan. You can also check out our pricing page for information on this. Apologies for any confusion, folks! Happy to report that these fixes and clarifications are now live. ⏪
• In addition to better error messages, we made our API a bit smarter with respect to Basic Authentication. While we stillrecommend using best practices for Basic Auth, we'll do our best to recognize other ways you send us your credentials in the Authorization header. 🔐
• For those of you that were agonizing over our glaring lack of icon support for HEAD and TRACE requests in the API Explorer — rejoice! We've just added them. 🎨
• Most ReadMe project administrators are only members of one or two projects — but for you power users out there, we made some minor readability improvements to the dashboard project list view. 👀
• Minor rendering improvements related to our newly redesigned project navigation bar. 🧭
• A couple of tiny design fixes to our new search feature. 🔍
• And last but definitely not least, some big behind-the-scenes improvements to our release process (which makes my job so much easier — thank you Rafe)! 🚀

Thank you for reading another weekly post,
Thank you for bearing with me as I do the most,
And thank you for being a part of the ReadMe community—
Check out this Code Switch episode on qualified immunity.

—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 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]!

Happy Tuesday folks! This edition of the Owlet Weekly Update is dedicated to my mother, who is celebrating her birthday today. 🎉 Feel free to tweet at us with your birthday shoutouts using the hashtag #happybirthdaykanadsmom!

We have some exciting updates to our API Explorer, our Suggested Edits workflow, and lots more. Details below! 👇🏽

Bigger Feature Updates and Improvements

• Building off our Cookie-filled announcement from a few weeks ago, the API Explorer now supports Cookie Authentication! (See a demo here.) 🍪
• Say goodbye to broken links when you change slugs in ReadMe! 🔗 Now, when you update the slug on a Guides or API Reference page, links to the old slug will magically redirect to the new slug! ✨
• This wouldn't be a true Owlet Weekly Update without a mention of our massive Search improvements! We're continuing our gradual (emphasis on gradual) rollout to even more projects. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback—let us know at [email protected]! 🔍
• Suggested Edits is one of my favorite features within ReadMe. If you’re anything like me when reviewing suggested edits, your review process generally entails reading the raw Markdown diff in the suggestion, closing your eyes, and imagining what these changes look like in the documentation. 🌀 Well I’ve got wonderful news for those of you that don’t share my vivid imagination. Suggested Edits now has a Preview button! 👀

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• A few weeks ago, we fixed a bug where users were unable to save their changes when making edits in Raw Mode. Turns out this was an issue with the Custom Pages as well. Happy to report that it's now fixed! 📝
• Now that data actually loads in Documentation Metrics, we discovered another bug where clicking to see additional info wouldn't even load that data. Sorry about that, folks. This issue has now been fixed! 👥
• Fixed an issue with our Segment Analytics integration where, for certain projects, it was only tracking initial page loads. 📈
• A small portion of projects may notice some speed improvements during the initial load of the ReadMe project dashboard. 🚀
• Various security and access improvements for projects that use both SAML and ReadMe login. 🔐
• Improvements to how our API Explorer code snippets handle application/x-www-form-urlencoded payloads. 📦
• Minor styling improvements to our api code snippets in the API Explorer. 💄
• Even more backward-compatibility improvements to the ReadMe Markdown engine. ⏪

Thanks again for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community (and happy birthday mom)!

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of the Owlet Weekly Update —an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the bug fixes and minor improvements 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]!

Happy Tuesday (and last day of June... 🤯), everyone! Last week was a short week for all of us at ReadMe — we spent Thursday and Friday at our summer "offsite." I'm putting "offsite" in quotes because we normally do our offsites in person, but this one was fully remote due to the pandemic... but despite the circumstances, we had a great time! Check out our latest Instagram post to see what we were up to. 👨🏽‍🎨

Despite the short week, we shipped a lot of exciting improvements to the navigation bar, Documentation Metrics, and more. Plus, our project is officially using the new Search improvements! Check out our project and hit ⌘ (or Ctrl)+K to see it in action!

Read onward to get the details on all of this. 👇🏽

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Owlet Weekly Update (working title) — an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the bug fixes and minor improvements 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]!

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• Enterprise projects were unable to load certain parts of the Documentation Metrics platform in the dashboard... yikes! Happy to report that the data is loading properly now, and that you can finally get back to learning about your documentation visitors again! 📊
• Certain projects were briefly unable to take advantage of the huge behind-the-scenes improvements to our Search feature. Those projects can now take advantage—search away! 🔥
• Improvements to how the ReadMe Markdown engine renders content in the Changelog. ✏️
• We were seeing an issue in Safari where certain API reference sections were getting cut off. That issue is now fixed! ✂️
• Some minor style fixes to the new Search design. 🎨
• Several small backward-compatibility improvements to the ReadMe Markdown engine. ⏪
• Various small linking fixes for enterprise projects. 🔗
• Loading improvements for API logs in the API Reference section. ⚡
• A couple of small style improvements on mobile (which you may have noticed if you're reading this post on your phone!). 📱

Bigger Feature Updates and Improvements

• You may have noticed in the last week or so that we made some design improvements to our navigation bar, which should drastically simplify project navigation! Check out our docs for information on how to enable these improvements on your project. 🧭
• One of these days, I'm going to stop mentioning our massive Search improvements... but today is not that day! We've been gradually rolling these beautiful visual updates over the last few weeks, and we're continuing that rollout to some more projects today (including ours)! Let us know what you think of the changes at [email protected]! 🔍

Thanks for reading and for being a part of the ReadMe community! —The ReadMe Team

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Welcome to the third edition of the Owlet Weekly Update (working title) — an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the bug fixes and minor improvements 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]!

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• We've been seeing an issue affecting projects with site-wide passwords where authenticated users were having troubles accessing these projects. Happy to report that this has been resolved! 🔐
• Fixed an issue affecting a small selection of Changelog posts (fortunately this didn't affect the Owlet Weekly Updates... that would have been awkward!) where the body content wasn't loading for logged out users. 📢
• Small usability improvements to our huge Search revamp that we announced a couple weeks ago. 🔍
• Behind-the-scenes improvements to our issue-tracking and release process. 🚀

Bigger Feature Updates and Improvements

As mentioned last week, we released a new NPM module called api and we just released some huge updates to our API Explorer so you can see this in action! 🎉

Now, there's a new code sample language option available via the OpenAPI Extension called node-simple. Including this in your OpenAPI file generates Node.js code samples using our api SDK. You can see this working in the ReadMe API documentation!

Additionally, we also made a few smaller fixes and improvements to the API Explorer:

• Resolved a bug with the way Content-Type headers would be interpreted in code snippets so now if the Content-Type on a request is application/json, the body payloads will be a JSON object, not a stringified JSON object. 📦
• Fixed some issues with the API Explorer not functioning if a server URL in an OpenAPI/Swagger file had a trailing slash. 🔗
• Added support for Cookie parameters across the API Explorer. (See a demo here!) 🍪

Thanks for reading! Again, if you have any questions or feedback on any of these updates, drop us a line at [email protected]!

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Welcome to the second edition of the Owlet Weekly Update (working title) — an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the bug fixes and minor improvements 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]!

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• Last week, we inadvertently introduced a bug where users were unable to save their changes to a page if making edits in Raw Mode... yikes! Happy to report that bug has been fixed 📝
• Fixed an issue for a small chunk of projects where certain internal documentation links were broken in the Changelog 🔗
• A small portion of projects were seeing an issue where they specified a Main URL that was different from ReadMe, but clicking the project logo navigated to their ReadMe landing page instead... this issue is now resolved! 🏠
• There was this pesky little issue when editing unpublished pages in the API Reference section where the preview links were inconsistent depending on where you clicked... that discrepancy has been fixed! 🧑‍🎨
• General stability improvements to ReadMe Free 💸
• Minor performance benchmarking improvements 📈

Bigger Feature Updates and Improvements

• We recently released an NPM module called api which makes it easier than ever to generate an SDK from an OpenAPI file 🚀 stay tuned for more info on how to integrate api-powered code samples into your ReadMe documentation!

📘

What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Owlet Weekly Update (working title) — an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of the bug fixes and minor improvements 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]!

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

• Performance and stability improvements to our new Markdown engine in the Changelog. 📝
• Fixed an issue where a small portion of our Enterprise customers were seeing a confusing redirect when logging out using our Custom OAuth flow. 🔐
• Fixed a bug where search engines could not access robots.txt for private projects. 🤖
• And last but not least... improvements to our release tracking process, so we can provide you with updates like these! 🚀

Bigger Feature Updates and Improvements

Search Improvements

We shipped some huge improvements to our search, including:

• Better search box design
• Improved indexing querying

Be sure to check out Marc's blog post for some background on our design and product development process.

ReadMe Free

We also released a new free plan! We’ve noticed that many companies come to us with only a Swagger/OpenAPI file or a simple list of endpoints. They don’t have the technical design resources or the time to build a full-featured developer hub, let alone an API Reference.

There are a lot of open source tools out there to build an API Reference, some better than others. We want everyone to have the option to use the best-in-class option available without worrying about its cost or added development effort. Our new free pricing tier was created to allow everyone to build a beautiful API Reference section at no cost.

We've released a big update to our syntax highlighting capabilities today to allow for the support of the following languages:

• CoffeeScript
• Clojure
• D
• Erlang
• Groovy
• Handlebars
• HTTP
• Julia
• LESS
• Perl
• Rust
• SASS
• YAML

Check out our Markdown engine documentation at https://docs.readme.com/rdmd/docs/code-blocks#language-support for the full list of languages we support, and how you can utilize them!