[HN Gopher] We rolled our own documentation site
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We rolled our own documentation site
Author : nerdypepper
Score : 27 points
Date : 2026-01-13 02:49 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.tangled.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.tangled.org)
| WillAdams wrote:
| For folks not familiar with this project:
|
| >Tangled is a decentralized Git hosting and collaboration
| platform.
|
| it is _not_ about Literate Programming (which is what I was
| expecting).
|
| A previous active discussion of this project:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543899
| sgtwompwomp wrote:
| Mintlify is really good. If you're a serious developer tool not
| sure why you wouldn't use it. For example I went into your docs
| and I don't see AI chat so I can ask quick, natural language
| questions. No MCP I can install so Cursor can query. Prob no
| llms.txt. No quick Copy to Markdown. This stuff is table stakes,
| if you don't have it and a competitor does, I'm not even
| considering you guys
|
| It's just a worse developer experience. Fine if you aren't a
| serious business, but yeah I wouldn't play down the value of
| Mintlify or similar products. It's seriously good and it's why
| huge companies use it
| 4k0hz wrote:
| >I don't see AI chat so I can ask quick, natural language
| questions. No MCP I can install so Cursor can query. Prob no
| llms.txt. No quick Copy to Markdown.
|
| It's not the site's job to add those features though. If you
| want that experience there are ways to get it without adding
| bloat to every page on the web. Scraping a static site and
| answering questions/summarizing is a solved problem.
| bognition wrote:
| It is the sites job to make documentation available to the
| users, no?
|
| It's so odd for a tech focused crowed to be so opposed to
| newer technology.
|
| Users are getting used to natural language search, not having
| it will be perceived as friction.
|
| Users are increasingly turning to agentic coding tools, those
| tools do best when documentation is available via an MCP
| server. Not having one will make it harder for people to use
| your product.
| 4k0hz wrote:
| I'm not opposed to the idea of natural language search, my
| point is the tools should be on the user side. Right now, I
| can ask questions about plain text pages that haven't been
| updated in 30 years directly in Firefox with no effort from
| the site operator. If an agent needs to have direct access
| to documentation, it's trivial for it to download pages
| autonomously (or even set up its own MCP server). There's
| literally no reason to demand that millions of sites
| independently add features that browsers and agents already
| have better and more uniform versions of.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Is it surprising that an AI fanatic wants/needs to be
| handheld?
| sgtwompwomp wrote:
| It's not a business's job to make their documentation
| accessible to their potential and current customers?
|
| I would ask if you've started a real business but it's clear
| you haven't. It is 100% on a developer tool startup to
| provide documentation that is easily accessible. If they
| don't, customers will struggle to get value. If you think
| this isn't true, then you are ignoring the gigantic market of
| companies purchasing documentation products (look at
| Mintlify's customer base for reference)
|
| There is no way I'm asking my customers to scrape my docs and
| build their own MCP server and AI assistant just to access it
| easily.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I run a documentation product, ReadMe. There's a lot of reasons
| to roll your own, but I'd recommend you also look into a third-
| party tool like us. One of the biggest reasons to use a product
| is that the building v1 is easy, but keeping it up to date over
| time is a lot tougher... you're stuck remembering how to deploy,
| figuring out a workflow, dealing with multiple versions, etc.
|
| You also just don't get a ton of really great features for your
| developers... fast typeahead search, AI tools (which your
| developers increasingly really want), navigation, accessibility
| and more. ReadMe also lets your developers play around with you
| API locally and get copy-and-paste code snippets.
|
| (If you're deciding between your own and ReadMe, email me!
| greg@readme.io; would love to talk)
| cmoski wrote:
| All for the low, low price of $350 US per month!
| gkoberger wrote:
| There's also a free version, and a $79/mo tier. We're also
| free for open source projects on our higher tiers.
|
| If it's not for you, that's okay! But an increasing number of
| documentation teams are cross-functional (marketing, sales,
| engineering, product), and not everyone is comfortable
| editing content directly in Git and dealing with a release.
|
| Docs are the heart and soul of most devtools, so I think it
| makes sense a lot of companies want a good product.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| I didn't find any indication on readme.io. Is it open source?
| gingersnap wrote:
| Talking about search on a static docs site, has anyone tried a
| static pre-generated search like https://lunrjs.com/ ?
| jorams wrote:
| Basically every Elixir package's docs include search based on
| Lunr, as it's included by default by ExDoc[1]. It's quite good.
|
| [1]: https://hexdocs.pm/ex_doc/
| nicbou wrote:
| I use Lunr on allaboutberlin.com. It's simple and effective,
| but searching the whole content would have required loading
| more files than I was comfortable with. Therefore it only
| searches titles and descriptions.
|
| There are probably workarounds, but it's the only limitation I
| can think of. Otherwise Lunr just works.
| butz wrote:
| I think https://develop.kde.org/docs/ is using lunrjs for
| search, but downloading and parsing almost 2MB file of search
| data creates some hiccups on website during load.
| fanf2 wrote:
| I use https://pagefind.app/ for search on my website. It's
| really easy to add to a static site.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I been using this project (seems to be abandoned now but still
| works) https://stork-search.net/
|
| Works great.
| butz wrote:
| This is great, no javascript. And while I am not a big fan of
| google search, alternative to open up all docs as single page and
| use Ctrl+F is neat.
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