(Prompted by Bruce Momjian's post at http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2012.html#March_27_2012, this message is adapted from my comment there)
I have one big frustration with the Postgres documentation, and that's its interface from Google. Say I want to look up information about maintenance_work_mem. I go to Google and search for "postgres maintenance_work_mem". I get page a page of results (https://www.google.com/search?q=postgresql+maintenance_work_mem) and three of the first four hits are, as one might expect, links to the Postgres docs website. The problem is that those three pages in the top four hits are to docs for older versions of Postgres: 8.0, 8.3 and 8.4. Based on how Google's page ranking work, the older pages will always be the highest ranking. The older pages become more established and rank higher as time goes on. This problem of linking to old pages in the documentation corpus isn't only for people coming in from Google. Search postgresql.org through its search box (http://www.postgresql.org/search/?q=maintenance_work_mem) and you still get the same mishmash of versions of pages. I'm focusing mostly on Google, however, because I'll bet a shiny new dime that the vast majority of hits on the postgresql.org docs are from external search engines, not the internal one. So I'm linked to an old version of the page in question. I'm aware of this, and I can account for it. If I go click on http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/runtime-config-resource.html, I know the page is not the latest (although maybe not every user will). I know that if I want the latest version of that page, or the version that applies to the Postgres that I'm running, I have to manually tweak the URL to change "/8.3/" to "/current/" or "/9.0/" or whatever version I want to see. What I would love love LOVE to see would be a dropdown by the "Home → Documentation → Manuals → PostgreSQL 8.3" where I'm able to choose from other versions easily. Or maybe it will be a list of other versions of this document available, hyperlinked to them. It would also help the casual reader know that there are multiple versions of the docs on the site by making it explicitly clear through those visual signposts "Hey, this isn't the only version of this page available, and perhaps you want a more current one." I'm here to both make this suggestion as a user of the docs, and to volunteer my time to help make it happen. Any interest? Thanks, xoxo, Andy -- Andy Lester => [email protected] => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance
