Link tags: documentation

Blocking bots – Manu

Blocking the bots is step one.

Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent • Robb Knight

See, this is exactly why we need to poison these bots.

Do That After This – Terence Eden’s Blog

Good advice for documentation—always document steps in the order that they’ll be taken. Seems obvious, but it really matters at the sentence level.

A Global Documentation Platform - Piccalilli

I was chatting to Andy last week and he started ranting about the future of online documentation for web developers. “Write a blog post!” I said. So he did.

I think he’s right. We need a Wikimedia model for web docs. I’m not sure if MDN fits the bill anymore now that they’re deliberately spewing hallucinations back at web developers.

Time team: Documenting decisions & marking milestones · Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s the transcript of Paul’s excellent talk at this year’s UX London:

How designers can record decisions and cultivate a fun and inclusive culture within their team.

Documentation for GPTBot - OpenAI API

Now that the horse has bolted—and ransacked the web—you can shut the barn door:

To disallow GPTBot to access your site you can add the GPTBot to your site’s robots.txt:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Introducing AI Help: Your Trusted Companion for Web Development | MDN Blog

As part of this pointless push, an “AI explain” button appeared on MDN articles. This terrible idea actually got pushed to production (bypassing the usual deploy steps) where it lasted less than a day.

You can read the havoc it wreaked in the short term. We’ll find out how much long-term damage it has done to trust in Mozilla and MDN.

This may be the worst use of a large language model I’ve seen since synthentic users (if you click that link, no it’s not a joke: “user research without the users” is what they’re actually proposing).

Just Simply | Stop saying how simple things are in our docs

If someone’s been driven to Google something you’ve written, they’re stuck. Being stuck is, to one degree or another, upsetting and annoying. So try not to make them feel worse by telling them how straightforward they should be finding it. It gets in the way of them learning what you want them to learn.

Learn HTML

This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.

The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system • Robin Rendle

I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:

If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.

Words To Avoid in Educational Writing | CSS-Tricks

This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.

Guarding Against Disposable Design — Smashing Magazine

Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.

Tolerance | Trys Mudford

Trys ponders home repair projects and Postel’s Law.

As we build our pages, components, and business logic, establish where tolerance should be granted. Consider how flexible each entity should be, and on what axis. Determine which items need to be fixed and less tolerant. There will be areas where the data or presentation being accurate is more important than being flexible - document these decisions.

Open UI

An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.

The Guardian digital design style guide

What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.

Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!

NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog Fall 1989

Brian found this scanned copy of a NeXT manual on the Internet Archive. I feel a great fondness for this machine after our CERN project.

How to run a small social network site for your friends

This is a great how-to from Darius Kazemi!

The main reason to run a small social network site is that you can create an online environment tailored to the needs of your community in a way that a big corporation like Facebook or Twitter never could. Yes, you can always start a Facebook Group for your community and moderate that how you like, but only within certain bounds set by Facebook. If you (or your community) run the whole site, then you are ultimately the boss of what goes on. It is harder work than letting Facebook or Twitter or Slack or Basecamp or whoever else take care of everything, but I believe it’s worth it.

There’s a lot of good advice for community management and the whole thing is a lesson in writing excellent documentation.

Humanizing Your Documentation - Full Talk - Speaker Deck

The slides from Carolyn’s talk at Beyond Tellerrand. The presentation is ostensibly about writing documentation, but I think it’s packed with good advice for writing in general.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects

200 discarded objects from a dump in San Francisco, meticulously catalogued, researched, and documented by Jenny Odell. The result is something more revealing than most pre-planned time capsule projects …although this project may be somewhat short-lived as it’s hosted on Tumblr.

Apollo Presskit Directory

Ah, what a wonderful treasure trove this is! PDF scans of Apollo era press kits from a range of American companies.

Categories include:

• Official NASA
• Earth
• Launch
• Lunar Module
• Moon
• Astronauts
• Reveal

There’s something so fascinating about the mundane details of Isolation/Quarantine Foods for Apollo 11 Astronauts from Stouffer’s.