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#Documentation

18 posts17 participants2 posts today

For a long time I had a very basic way of archiving documents, articles and books. Filesystem with years as folders and the PDFs got some date and clever name. Now I switched to paperwork. It feels so much easier now to archive and access the documents, because of the full text search and labels. openpaper.work

www.openpaper.workPaperwork - Personal document management made fast and easy - OpenPaperworkPaperwork, a personal document manager designed to make your life easier

💾 How do you document your homelab? 🏠💡

Do you have a structured system for keeping track of your setups? Are you a meticulous curator of computer configurations? A dotfile dilettante? A network note-taker?

I'm looking for sustainable, open-source-friendly ways to document and templatize system and network setups. I really am only interested in something easy to maintain, not tied to a specific proprietary tool, and useful for both tracking infrastructure state and making changes over time.

How do you manage this? Markdown wikis? Git-based IaC? YAML sprawl? Hand-etched stone tablets? Drop your thoughts, workflows, or favorite tools! 🚀🔧

📸 The use of #streetphotography as an exploration method can bring so much awareness on the context of your research.

Above all when working on place-based projects, going around and shooting allows you to live the territory, experience the spirit of the area, meet its people.

🔍 Moreover, street photography is #research and #documentation at the same time. Which is very handy when you have many tasks in your hands.

🖌️ #Peckham, with its #graffiti and #colours, is very photogenic.

Ph. by Abbey Lew

#researchmethod #placebased #territory #people

Latest attempt at building better documentation for thi.ng/umbrella (also to make it available offline!): Having noticed that recent versions of TypeDoc support extracting & merging of doc strings from monorepos, over the past few weeks I've been updating/cleaning docstrings in hundreds of source files across all 200+ packages and started building a small tool to assemble a single/mega-page documentation (currently ~4.3MB of just HTML). The tool translates existing docstrings and references contained therein (and still used for the existing API docs) to support proper cross-package references.

I've uploaded an early preview here:
docs.thi.ng/umbrella/

Please be aware that so far this is only an early stage prototype and only contains very limited docs. I.e. there are no generics/typeparams, no details about classes/interfaces... But at least I know now HOW to add this all, as well as all the additional metadata I've already got (currently still only available via other custom tools/examples).

For example, there're links to the tag-based browser[1] and I'm also planning to add the fuzzy doc search engine/index[2] to this new documentation... The tag browser integration still needs more work in terms of correctly matching package names to tags. The underlying system is there already, just needs more work in terms of actually doing/assigning the concept mapping. Since most package names in thi.ng/umbrella are very plain/boring (for a reason), for many (most?) packages this already works pretty well:

Example: Visiting the WebGL package docs: docs.thi.ng/umbrella/#webgl and then clicking on "examples" for this package, then opens the tag browser for WebGL: demo.thi.ng/umbrella/thing-bro where you can then see all other packages and examples related to this topic...

More updates on this all soon! Excited! 🤩

(EDIT: added screenshots...)

[1] demo.thi.ng/umbrella/thing-bro
[2] demo.thi.ng/umbrella/rdom-sear

🚀 NEW on We ❤️ Open Source 🚀

Great open source projects need great documentation! 📝 In this article, Jim Hall shares 4 open source documentation tools to make it easier:

✔️ Markdown for lightweight writing
✔️ HTML for web-based docs
✔️ LibreOffice for polished PDFs
✔️ Vim for quick edits

What’s your go-to documentation tool? Let’s talk! 💬

Read more: allthingsopen.org/articles/4-o

If you write a successful #foss project and don't write in a wiki or similar format where people can JUST contribute without having to go through you or through a bureacratic nightmare to document how YOUR software works, you're an idiot.