Overhauling Hologram's documentation

Overhauling Hologram's documentation — cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things
Product News
Ben Forgan
November 21, 2016
Hologram new documentation dashboard

Last week, we released a comprehensive update to Hologram's documentation. This included an almost complete rewrite of the content, as well as a redesigned site and a better way for us to keep documentation up-to-date.Here's a closer look at some of our biggest considerations when developing the updated docs site:

Organization

The docs are now split into two main sections: Guide and Reference. The Guide contains a quick-start tutorial and other articles for new users to learn about Hologram's concepts and features. The Reference section contains more in-depth resources for technical users, including hardware datasheets and API references. Regardless of whether you're new to cellular IoT or already a Hologram power user, this new organization will make it easy for you to find the information you're looking for.

Maintainability

A major priority of this overhaul was to make it easy to update content, track changes, and accept contributions from the Hologram community. We decided to author our documentation in Markdown text files, and to manage versioning in a Git repository. Git was originally designed for source code version control, but it's also a great fit for text content, especially when collaborating with many people. In addition, we will soon be publishing the Markdown source on GitHub, so that anyone can contribute changes to our docs!To convert our Markdown source files into the nicely formatted final site, we're using a Node.js-based static site generator called Metalsmith. Metalsmith has a lot of plugins available for common tasks like adding a table of contents, and we found it very easy to extend with our own custom logic. We believe our documentation is as integral to the customer experience as the Hologram Dashboard and other product features, and these behind-the-scenes changes will help us give it the attention it deserves.

Onward and upward

This update is just the beginning of a renewed focus on documentation and usability. We'll continue to improve our documentation in the weeks and months ahead, and we welcome your feedback on what we can do to make your experience better!

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