Recent posts¶

• 10 March - Read the Docs newsletter - March 2022

  It’s been pretty quiet on the company front in February, with nothing much to report. We’re actively working on our latest job description, which will be a product-focused Python development position. If you’re interested, please let us know.

  In February we continued to work on refactors and internal changes. Among the major user-facing changes:

• 07 March - War in Ukraine and what it means for Read the Docs

  With news surrounding the invasion of Ukraine evolving rapidly, we felt it was necessary to provide an update to our users and customers.

  At Read the Docs, we are outraged and saddened by the invasion of Ukraine and we condemn this act of violence as wrong and unlawful. We are monitoring the situation in Europe and how it relates to our employees, customers, and our services to the open source world.

• 01 March - Deprecation of the git:// protocol on GitHub

  Last year, GitHub announced the deprecation of the unsecured Git protocol due to security reasons. This change will be made permanent on March 15, 2022.

  At Read the Docs we found around 900 projects using a Git protocol URL (git://github.com/user/project) to clone their projects. To save time for our users, we have migrated those to use the HTTPS cloning URL instead (https://github.com/user/project).

• 08 February - Read the Docs newsletter - February 2022

  Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

  We have mostly finished migrating Read the Docs for Business users to Cloudflare for SSL. There are lots of interesting features this will enable, so stay tuned for updates there.

• 26 January - Sphinx 4.4 release and other ecosystem news

  In this post we spread the word about the most relevant news of the Sphinx ecosystem of the past weeks, including Sphinx itself as well as extensions and themes developed by the community.

  Sphinx 4.4 was released on January 17th with numerous changes, including:

• 12 January - Read the Docs newsletter - January 2022

  Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

  We are now managing custom domains for our corporate users using Cloudflare SSL for SaaS, which will remove the manual work that was needed on our side and make the process of setting up a custom domain almost instantaneous. It also will allow us to offer a CDN much easier in the future.

• 20 December - Sphinx and Markdown around the world in 2021

  Read the Docs has been committed to improving the accessibility and user experience of Sphinx since the start, and that includes the markup language in which the documentation is written. Years ago, after carefully listening to users, we announced recommonmark to help bridging the immense popularity of Markdown with the powerful capabilities of Sphinx. (It is now deprecated in favor of MyST - keep reading to know more.)

  It is no surprise that Markdown is in such demand: thanks in large part to the huge popularity of GitHub, Markdown is nowadays the most widely used markup language in open-source projects, ahead of reStructuredText, the second in the list, by an order of magnitude.

• 14 December - Read the Docs newsletter - December 2021

  Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

  We successfully deployed mitigation measures against spam, and we are happy to report that the amount of abusive projects has dramatically decreased.

• 07 December - Announcing Embed API v3 and sphinx-hoverxref 1.0

  We are thrilled to announce the availability of Read the Docs Embed API v3, along with its official client, sphinx-hoverxref 1.0. This work has been possible in part thanks to the the CZI grant we received.

  As we wrote in our first blog post about sphinx-hoverxref, one of the most powerful features of Sphinx is the possibility of creating cross references to other documentation projects. However, a reader finding several links in a technical documentation might need to open several browser tabs to fully understand the context, resulting in a lot of friction in the form of context switching.

• 11 November - Read the Docs ❤️ Jupyter Book

  We are proud to announce that now Jupyter Book projects are supported on Read the Docs!

  Both Read the Docs and The Executable Book Project, the folks behind Jupyter Book, share a common passion for documentation, and we have been collaborating on various topics for some time already. For example, we started promoting MyST in favor of our recommonmark back in April this year, and we wrote a guide on using Jupyter notebook with Sphinx that benefitted a lot from their feedback.