Posted in 2017

MOSS Final Report

Last year, we were given a MOSS Award to work on improving the Python documentation ecosystem. We announced the initial deployment last November, and this is the retrospective post about how the project as a whole went.

This work is live at http://www.pydoc.io/ and on GitHub:

Ads on the Alabaster Theme on Read the Docs Community Sites

16 June 2017
Axel Sepúlveda
Portland, Oregon
advertising community updates community ads

We’ve been running our ethical advertising campaign for over a year now, and it is starting to show success on making Read the Docs more sustainable.

Over this time, we have only been running ads on Read the Docs themed projects. The primary reason for this is making sure that our display of ads is consistent and doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. We’re trying hard to build a sustainability model that respects our users, and making sure things are well designed and unobtrusive is an important part of this.

PyCon 2017 in Review

Things are finally getting back to normal for us after another very busy PyCon. It’s always wonderful seeing old friends and getting a chance to meet new friends from the community. PyCon provides a great outlet to talk to others in our community about the problems we all face as open source developers and open source companies – like funding, sustainability, and building community. We are sad to see PyCon leave Portland, but luckily PyCascades will soon be filling the void left in Cascadia after PyCon moves on.

This year, we announced official sprints on Read the Docs during the sprint week following PyCon. We focused our sprint efforts on code cleanup, in order to avoid the problems on-boarding new contributors we normally face as a large project.

Release for May 12, 2017

Yesterday, we rolled out improved webhook management for projects, and several bug fixes around our upgrade to Sphinx 1.5.

We’ve been slowly making upgrades to our webhook management page. Projects that set up new webhooks will see a list of webhooks that we have configured, including HTTP exchanges that we encounter from each remote webhook.

Uniregistry sponsors Read the Docs and Open Source

Today we’re excited to announce an important sponsorship partner in our Ethical Advertising campaign: Uniregistry. Our goal with our ethical advertising program is to provide important funding for open source, and show that it can be done ethically – without tracking our users and only offering ads from relevant partners.

Domain registration was identified early as a natural partner to our program, because it sits in the stack of necessary infrastructure for all of us that work on making the internet. We wanted the right partner, because historically we feel that domain registration companies have had awful UX. We’ll cover a few of the criteria we used to reach the conclusion to partner with Uniregistry.

Build Image Upgrades

Starting this week, we’ll be deploying a new default image for our documentation build environments. This image will change the default Python versions that are supported.

We aren’t expecting any issues to arise from this change, but be sure to raise any issues on our issue tracker if you notice any strange behavior. The new build image supports Python 2.7 and Python 3.5, dropping support for Python 3.4. If you require access to Python 3.4, we suggest you sign up for access to our next beta image.