Add search functionality

[gianpaj]

There are client side libraries now that allow for full-text search on the browser: http://lunrjs.com/example/

I think it's more natural to search by description, tags, etc rather than name.

Would this mean storing the data in a different way?

https://github.com/slashdotdash/jekyll-lunr-js-search (Jekyll + lunr.js = Static websites with powerful full-text search using JavaScript)

[stennie]

FYI, there are currently filters by Purpose/License/Language/Platform at the top of page.

Not sure a full text search will add much value given the current descriptions tend to be very short, but perhaps more helpful as the content bulks out.

[IanWhalen]

Yeah, I'll need to think on this - I originally had a sort of "omnibar" functionality (it looked like a search bar but was actually a multiselect with autocomplete), but I found that it felt much better to have the options spelled out - otherwise you might not know that "backup" is something you could even search for, for example.

I also don't think anyone is necessarily using this to search by name. As Stennie said, they're probably searching by language, use case, etc.

For now my two focuses are definitely:

1) providing a better sort functionality that sorts by some kind of "popularity" metric. this is difficult in a list of open and closed source apps (e.g. you can't just sort of # of stars) and in a static site (e.g. you can just store the number of pageviews and sort by that). not sure what the solution is.

2) making the individual tool pages better. they have zero content right now. i'd like to make them significantly more useful in a way that's a bit more scalable than adding self-written reviews of every single one.

[gianpaj]

I see your point in the search by name. To be honest to build something like this and make it scalable it has to be crowdsourced. In order to keep the quality of generated and maintained these listings. The amount of tools out there and the phase at which new are created and updated is just going to speed up.

If we think this project is going to grow legs and replace the Admin UIs, as mentioned by @stennie, then we might think to invest in adding more functionality via a hosted server (or similar, maybe Firebase?).

For example we might want to comments, allow more external contributions, etc. There must be some opensource tool that is already doing this, so we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

http://alternativeto.net/ is quite complex but the essence is there.

Maybe I'm over thinking this, and we should take one step at the time and focus on what matters first. At the same time I would like to raise the question on the purpose of this project and how it can become more useful a larger number of developers, DBA's, etc.

PS: the screenshots on Admin UIs page might be very useful to put in the individual tool pages for at a glance to see what it does or what purpose it serves. See the various "components" of features this page has: http://alternativeto.net/software/mongodb/

[gianpaj]

Lastly, this site looks very good (even though the "Search is temporarily offline"): http://www.jsdb.io/

[gianpaj]

What makes repositories or developers trend? We look at a variety of data points including stars, forks, commits, follows, and pageviews, weighting them appropriately. It's not just about total numbers, but also how recently the events happened.

https://github.com/blog/1585-explore-what-is-trending-on-github

[gianpaj]

Check this site of meteor packages tools that are trending. http://atmospherejs.com/

unfortunately i don't this site's code is on open sourced. and looks like there is some server side processing.