About Documentation Page

Hey 👋 I'm Francisco and I've been making open source for the last 10 years. Some of the projects I've made are very important to me, so I try to document them well in markdown. Then with few scripts I generate their documentation pages:

You can guess which project came first from the sophistication of the website. As I create a new project, I'd put more work into the UI/UX. But I found a few problems:

• Keeping all of the projects docs website updated and bug-free was difficult. I tried to backport new features but this was not always feasible.
• The projects had a complex documentation setup, often more complex than the actual project build. Creating a successful project is hard enough so we should not handicap ourselves.
• There were lots of unrelated files in the project folder. When someone is navigating your repo they should not be bothered by CSS, icons, etc.

This went on for embarrassingly long! My first open source project Picnic CSS was almost on the 10-year mark and I dreaded touching its documentation.

Solution

If I'm having this problem surely many other open source authors are! I've made few attempts at solving this in the past but wasn't happy with the result, like paperdocs.

Documentation Page started as a small experiment, and after seeing a lot of potential I decided to fully build it. I'm very happy at how it has turned out! So happy that I'm migrating all of my project's documentation there.

My goal is to help open source have better documentation. That's why I'm being a bit funny on the price and setting it as low as realistically possible, including a free plan. I'm also (so far!) a single dev doing this so I cannot just throw Big Bucks at the problem.

If you want to help please donate or subscribe to the Important Project plan, that'll help Documentation Page be successful! I'd also be very happy to do some consulting on documentation for your company at a discount.