Announcing Grok the Docs

Are my docs working?
Are users getting what they need?

I’ve asked myself these questions a lot. Historically I have put Google Analytics on my doc pages, and called it good. I would browse over the Analytics data every once in a while, gleaning basically zero interesting data out of it.

Read the Docs hosts a lot of documentation, and I want to help these folks understand how their docs are being used. So I have been working on a project for the last month called Grok the Docs.

Grok the Docs is a bit different, with the main difference being it embeds the information in the page for you. This is interesting because it adds context to the data. Context allows you to see all of the analytic data at once, in a format that makes sense within the documentation.

Surfacing analytic data in the page is great for the maintainer and user alike. The maintainer can see what parts of their docs are being heavily used, and which parts aren’t being used as much. Users can see where other people are ending up, which is probably where they want to go too.

This is very much just a tech demo currently. I would love feedback from folks about how I could improve the display of the data. Also, it would be great if you have ideas for other additoinal functionality that could be added. This is very much an experiment currently, so I’d love to hear any thoughts you have.

Once the code is more baked and solid, the plan is to turn it on for all Read the Docs users. After I do a full rollout across Read the Docs, I’ll consider opening it to other people. The code is currently closed source, and will likely remain so. That said, it will always be free for documentation on Read the Docs.

This project was done as part of my ongoing work to improve documentation. If you think this work is important, you should support me on Gittip.

Example

This shows how user might harness this data.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/372293/GTD-Example.gif

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I am currently working to improve open source doucmentation. If you think this work is important, please support me on Gittip.

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