Merge pull request #218 from ipums/docs-cleanup

Clean up Sphinx docs workflow

Author: riley-harper

doc/developer.md

@@ -40,19 +40,21 @@ Then move the built Scala jar over to the hlink directory with `mv target/scala-
 ## Working with the Sphinx Docs
 
 We use Sphinx to generate the hlink documentation at [hlink.docs.ipums.org](hlink.docs.ipums.org).
-These docs live in the `sphinx-docs` directory as Markdown files, and Sphinx converts them to html
-files that live in the `docs` directory. To write out the Sphinx docs to the `docs` folder, run
+These docs live in the `sphinx-docs` directory as Markdown files, and a GitHub Actions
+workflow automatically builds them with Sphinx on pushes to main. To manually generate
+a local copy of the HTML documentation, run
 
 ```
 cd sphinx-docs
-make
+make html
 ```
 
-To test out your changes without having to push to the official site, Python's `http.server` module
-works nicely.
+This will output the documentation to the \_build/html/ subdirectory of
+sphinx-docs/ by default. To test out your changes without having to push to the
+official site, Python's `http.server` module works nicely.
 
 ```
-python -m http.server -d docs <port>
+python -m http.server -d _build/html <port>
 ```
 
 starts up an HTTP server running on port `<port>` on the local machine.
@@ -78,7 +80,7 @@ Here are the steps to follow when creating the new version.
 - Decide on the new version number A.B.C, following the scheme above.
 - Set the new version number in `pyproject.toml`.
 - Reinstall hlink with `pip install -e .[dev]` to update the version. Confirm that this worked by running `hlink --version`.
-- Update sphinx-docs/changelog.md with the new version number, then regenerate the Sphinx docs so that they show the correct hlink version number.
+- Update sphinx-docs/changelog.md with the new version number and make sure that it is up to date.
 - After committing your changes, create a git tag `vA.B.C` and push it to GitHub.
 - Finally, create a GitHub release for the tag. This is intended for record-keeping
 for developers, so it's fine to automatically generate the release notes. The user-