Introducing documentation on bayton.org

The way content is published on bayton.org is changing. Despite efforts to incorporate features into posts based on length, complexity, etc, I’ve not been pleased with the results. As such, over the last few weekends I’ve been working on a new area of the site dedicated to long-form, technical articles which will benefit from features like:

While categories and tags have their place, when reading through documentation on a subject there’s nothing quite as good as having content-aware navigation, allowing quick access to both similar topics, those in a series, or just having the ability to jump up a level without requiring any additional effort.

Every article will now have a table of contents to refer to, saving endless scrolling on longer articles as is currently the case.

To make it as easy possible to:

1. Share the article from a particular point
2. Pick up exactly where you left off via a simple link

Each heading now has it’s own direct link within a document:

To make it easier to differentiate between topics, each one has a unique colour; super useful for finding related documentation at a glance:

Furthermore, all new documentation is highlighted beneath the topic it sits under, as demonstrated above.

Traditional WordPress posts tend to drift off into the abyss after they’re pushed out of the first page in the admin area and it’s very much a case of out of sight, out of mind unless a comment to say something isn’t working pops up. What’s more, occasionally these posts rely on other posts for context or additional content which also has to be located and edited when it falls out of date.

It’s all a bit involved and less than simple to maintain keeping these posts updated.

While still today most of the writing done is contextually sensitive (Vault7 and the CIA: This is why we need EMM for example), an increasing number of articles are far more suited to a fixed, date-exempt (within reason) hierarchy which makes keeping them updated far easier.

There are even more features available to readers of bayton.org docs I haven’t mentioned here, to get started and check it out yourself, head over to:

/docs

I hope this improves the quality of reading for visitors and I’ll carry on tweaking as necessary to improve it more!

If you have questions, comments or concerns, do feel free to reach out in the comments.