How to grow Awesome?

[sindresorhus]

The Awesome list concept has turned out to be very popular, with a great community ❤️ around it!

I'm wondering what else we could do with the Awesome brand? Would there be any interest in an Awesome meetup? Maybe a blog highlighting awesome things? Email newsletter? Twitter account? Would you follow it if so? Printed awesome socks? Because why not.

I'm open for ideas. No idea is too weird or crazy.

Or maybe there's no need to do anything more. That's a valid comment too.

[Jogai]

I'm watching some lists just to see what gets submitted. A monthly update with things like added/denied submissions would be of interest to me..

[dashed]

Email newsletter?

A curated newsletter of "This week in awesome.". 👍

[Sljux]

Twitter account would also be cool, "Today's most awesome awesome".

[cmmata]

A Twitter account / newsletter / blog showing new awesome additions or removals would be great. Right now, the only way is watching repositories and that creates a lot of noise.

Also, an Awesome meetup sounds nice, but where would it be? One or several countries? Maybe an annual event sounds better, with some people talking in awesome conferences.

An Awesome t-shirt would be funny too :)

[ada-lovecraft]

Seconding the newsletter idea.

I would also plaster my laptop with an Awesome sticker

[sindresorhus]

I would also plaster my laptop with an Awesome sticker

https://www.stickermule.com/marketplace/10034-awesome

[janisozaur]

I watch this repo to know about new awesome lists, then if I find one interesting, start following it as well. I also subscribe to GitHub's explore, so I think weekly digest is a nice idea.

Perhaps doing something in likelihood of aforementioned GitHub's explore would also be nice idea – think about new subscribers, they will have probably missed out on so much already, but you cannot send out duplicates of lists too often, as long-time subscribers would get annoyed.

The email could have a form of one (or more) highlights (perhaps in coordination with maintainer of list in question) and digest of recently accepted lists.

[nagygergo]

Yea, a weekly digest would be really nice. Also it should be human curated, because that makes the awesome brand awesome.

[kevingo]

I love twitter account + weekly idea 👍

[JesseTG]

How about branded underwear? So awesome, you'll shit your pants.

[guozheng]

1. when the list grows bigger and bigger, can we have some good ways to support search?
2. the pink glass icon is a bit strange to me, could be just me, looks like a pair of bra. Not saying that bra is not awesome ;P, just a bit strange...

[sindresorhus]

when the list grows bigger and bigger, can we have some good ways to support search?

Cmd f is your friend.

the pink glass icon is a bit strange to me, could be just me, looks like a pair of bra. Not saying that bra is not awesome ;P, just a bit strange...

I intentionally made it bright pink to troll people. :trollface:

[JesseTG]

I intentionally made it bright pink to troll people. :trollface:

How? I don't get it. Just looks like a well-designed Hipster-Tech-Thing-201X logo to me.

[kodie]

I love the logo. Going to buy one to put on my MacBook. I thought this was a cool idea: https://github.com/AwesomeCities

[xin053]

+1 for twitter account

[filipecatraia]

@kodie Not a fan. The list for Berlin isn't bad. But the use case is better served via reviews on third-party services. (And I can't believe I'm suggesting Foursquare over an open-source list?)

[hql287]

Beating Product Hunt? Not crazy enough? No? :)

[kevingo]

I also love T-shirt idea.

[lockys]

@guozheng, To your first question, in addition to cmd + f, the AwesomeSearch may be helpful for you!

[gauthamzz]

Wbt something like an awesome check list Users can select which all categories they like and they will get something like a list randomly generated of their interest. One who reads the most links is the awesomest based on something like credit system or something. If you add more to any list credit increases . just a crazy idea :)

[tremblerz]

Let's have an app where people can subscribe and afterwards mention their interests, then automatically email should be sent to them if something "awesome" gets added which matches with their interest. This app can be merged with newsletter

[SangramChavan]

Can include programming contest such as IEEEXtreme https://github.com/IEEEXtreme and https://github.com/lnishan/awesome-competitive-programming

[xel]

Seeing how often items are going to be updated in the list, you might as well start a weekly/monthly newsletter that summarizes stuff. Awesome new additions etc

[hatzopoulos]

1) :newspaper_roll: The weekly digest and curated list some people here have described is a great idea.

2) :beer: The meetups idea is a good one too! Like an 'awesome workshop' for a perticular list where people can meet and talk about things related to the list. So for example the awesome-github-cheatsheet meetup at such and such bar or the 'Awesome-Macos' meetup. Or it doesn't have to be about one topic or list. It could be a meetup about a general topic or no topic at all is just as good too. I just think might be more successful if there was a topic or theme. Then perhaps if it kicks off nicely we can have an 'awesome-calendar' containing tons of awesome-events on a wide range of topics to choose from (hopefully) all around the world.

3) :mag: That AwesomeSearch project is cool, I just saw that now. How about just expanding that or re-branding it so it's more then just search. Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems to already parse all the lists and has a pretty cool user interface to search. So what if you folks expand the list details. Add a 'explore feature' perhaps the same sorta way GitHub's explore repos works. Other things it could include is maybe screenshots of the links and some sort of stats. Using the GitHub API you could also pull stats from the repos. Web stats, top charts, trends, etc.

4) :link: Another idea would be a 404/301 checking bot that reported to the repos when things are broken or moved would be pretty cool.

[itsjtwright]

What if there was a website that sent you to a random awesome link, one of the resources, like a learn something random but its learn something awesome. I would use that

[xingh]

I think in addition to the Awesome Search / Ctrl F search, we could index all the sites that the lists are linking to make a real search. I'm working on this project and will publish the index in the next few weeks.

[sindresorhus]

I'm going to start with a weekly newsletter if there's enough interest:

Awesome Weekly

Sign up to show your interest and make it happen!

[a7madgamal]

so many ideas <3 However, I think what we really need is just an awesome official API and the rest will just follow! If we build and maintained an API to list and keep track of awesomeness we can easily build 100's of awesome products (social integrations, apps, websites.....)

[kminek]

Guys, if we would like to take the whole idea further, we should lay some rules how such awesome links documents should be structured. That would allow us write a parser and machine-process the data. This is my rough draft of such standard:

Marklink

Suggestions are welcome.

[legodude17]

@kminek that sounds really cool.

@sindresorhus how many people have signed up for the newsletter?

[sindresorhus]

@legodude17 983! :) Getting close.

[legodude17]

@sindresorhus Really hope it gets to 1000. Really ❤️ this idea.

[kminek]

hi there,

i finished initial Marklink parser implementation. here is an example how this list is parsed:

http://awesomelist.kminek.pl/marklink?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kminek/awesome/master/readme.md

:)

[denispeplin]

@sindresorhus, I've also tried to parse awesome list and found that deep parsing (even splitting by categories) is hard, because each list is formatted differently. My primary goal is to get stars for every Github link, and also to mark outdated Github repositories by number of years they are outdated. So I've created a parser that handles only Github links, adds stars and marks outdated, and not more. Result is here: https://awesomerank.github.io/ Stars and years you can found in one of the child lists, for example: https://awesomerank.github.io/lists/h4cc/awesome-elixir.html I've made builder opensource: https://github.com/awesomerank/rank. There some ideas in its TODO list inside its Readme. I'm sure that parsing, even that simple, opens opportunity for some more ideas. Of course there are bugs, but generally it works. Any feedback is very welcome.

[mariobro]

Wait, so did the awesome twitter ever happen? Also how is progress on standardizing the list formats in order to develop the api? If any of those things still need to be done I wouldn't mind taking point on them (albeit with a little help on standardizing data and creating api's).

If awesome meet-ups still haven't taken off I would also be up for trying to organize some of that - one thing that could also be done is virtual meetups where people from different cities could still work together.

On another note, how is the email list doing? How many subscribers is it at now?

[InAnimaTe]

I just signed up for the newsletter...we'll see if I get any. Looks like a twitter did happen: https://twitter.com/awesome__re

I also think an API is really a sweet idea. Programmatic access to Awesome would be awesome! Really interested in the future of this in addition to hosting it etc..

[aschrijver]

Idea: Offer a branded template to expose awesome lists easily as HTML using GH Pages.

This way awesome lists would get better exposure to a wider public than is now the case. Example is React Native: http://www.awesome-react-native.com/

[sindresorhus]

@aschrijver I don't really see the point of those websites. The Markdown rendering on GitHub looks great. Much better than most of those websites.

[aschrijver]

Maybe, but that was why I was thinking of having a branded template.. an awesome branded template, just like the badge is also branded, and you have strict rules of inclusion for any awesome list to the list-of-lists..

A template would be a way to enforce compliance (or else the list wouldn't show up correctly). And also - like the RN list - a ToC sidebar would make long lists easier to navigate (not needing a long ToC at the top). And you can add metadata, like for SEO, and generating link previews with image for social sharing.

[dexpota]

Maybe create an organization which collects all of the awesome lists on Github?

[sindresorhus]

@dexpota Awesome lists thrive better when the maintainers feel ownership of them. There's no good reason to move them to an org.

[dexpota]

I can see the reasoning on maintaining a 'decentralized' organization of the Awesome lists. It is my opinion that a downside of that is that the number of poorly maintained lists or duplicated ones will rise. This was the reasoning behind my proposal, but again I understand that this 'decentralization' is something wanted.

@sindresorhus thank you for the quick feedback.

[sierikov]

A website maybe? Something clean and modern on Github Pages with Jekyll. If you want a website - just like this comment and I will fork this repo and add a docs folder where the website will be located. To save the original GitHub list.

Just made example header, see below:

[sindresorhus]

@ArtemSer I don’t really see the need for a website.

[Jogai]

@ArtemSer there are several already.

[busi-reddy-karnati]

How about sorting the README alphabetically? I would do that, if you ask me to. Cheers

[karx]

So when is the next (first) AwseomeFest ? I am in!

We need more awesome in the world, and this delivers.

Update: I maybe overthinking here: My thoughts for AwesomeFest, but scribbled what I could.

[BishikaSinha]

Make an Instagram, Twitter and Facebook pages for awsome

[pkgland]

Not a typical Awesome project per se, but https://pkg.land (beta, just launched!) is heavily inspired by the core concept of Awesome: "curated suggestions", to be exact: pkg.land will curate a list of similar npm packages based on what you search!

Example: if you search "moment", https://pkg.land/moment will suggest you "dayjs", "date-fns" and more...

Still in its early days so any feedback are welcome and will help the project grow 🪴

[riderx]

@sindresorhus website can allow you to rank better on SEO than just a GitHub repo, you can have page for all list, it will make the brand stronger