It’s time to retire my Gitbook.
It was fun for a little while but I think I need to move on. Gitbook was really useful to use as it was a light coding effort to create documents. I liked the way it was easy to write these tabs for “Code” and “Output” however I don’t know how useful that was to the readers.
There was a lot I could do with the documentation with drag and drop which made it way better than ReadTheDocs than embedding images programmatically.
It made it look nice, however it started becoming expensive for my open source project as I wanted more folk to contribute. Each person had to be a team member at $19 per user. There was also some overhead in learning how to use it/contribute.
Perhaps it was the way I formulated my documentation but I got more questions than intended because perhaps people couldn’t understand my documentation. That being said I started transferring things over to Github Wiki.
The first thing that felt nice was that it was right next to the code. I could point people to the wiki. I liked the user interface and the sidebar pages on the right hand side. It looked clean and not too fancy which I think was better in my opinion than the Gitbook.
I’ve been able to onboard my team for my open source software pretty rapidly with the markdown to preview feature because it’s easy to adopt. Another key aspect is all the user information is one place and I can track it effectively using the same interface for commits.
Moving forward I am to shut down my Gitbook today and transfer everyone to wiki.
