Glad to see you picked it up and actually built and launched.
and thanks for the domain brandon!
Say you are a web designer who just found out about GitHub (I know right?), then what would their first steps look like? Maybe spend hours googling around random sites discovering outdated "10 popular plugins for Bootstrap" kind of stuff. I think this applies to all kinds of things as well.
I also think this is one of the reasons they took on funding to figure out these problems. I had been contemplating adding similar functionality to my GitHub web app. I kind of think they should start an app marketplace (I know YAAM) to bring additional functionality beyond the scope of GitHub that wants to manage (ex: they killed off messages), I realize they have Services, but I don't think that is clearly enough, similar to how Facebook recently added App Center.
I am also interested in how this plays out. Maybe this project will succeed, or maybe something else better solves the problem. Either way I think it will be awesome.
There is so much out there, it can sometimes be hard to make sense of it or manage it in a way that suites someone the best. This is just my stab at trying to solve the problem.
If you have any other input on how to make it more useful please just let me know! Thanks again!
Some repos become dead then I look for forks to see if somebody fix it or improve it. Normally, I need to open several forks to select one.
I imagine a interface like a leaderboard where the most uptodate and with more commits lead the pack...
I'll start scoping that out and see what a solution would look like, seems like it would helpful for a lot of projects.
Thanks for the idea mamcx!
I find it difficult to track the 100+ private repos we have for various projects and such. Giving me some ability to organize them by folders along with some general notes, would be useful and something I'd pay a small bit of cash for.
> Typically it is not easy to answer questions like "What is the most popular jQuery Instagram library?" or "What Ruby gems are similar to Devise but newer?".
>
> This is where Gitrep aims to help.
But, then, I totally failed to discover how to do that sort of search. The search dialog seems to be tag based. Is the copy aspirational or am I missing something?
tl;dr: yes, it is a little aspirational as of now, but will change.
The first search you can do, since I equate "star count" to popularity, and by default all results are sorted by star count/popularity.
The second search will be entirely implemented soon. You can find repos similar to other repos according to their tags, but can't sort by created or updated date yet. The information is there in the data, I just need to finish that functionality in the search and sorting.
I wanted to try to get something out the door before I finished every feature to see what people would use and what requests/issues people would have, and prioritize accordingly. Otherwise I know I would spend weeks fleshing out every feature I thought I wanted, including many that most would find useless =(.
In retrospect, you are correct in that it is a little misleading since you assume you can do that yet. It will hopefully be corrected shortly (busy trying to keep things running smoothly!).
Thanks for the input troutwine! I'll finish this functionality hopefully this week (if not sooner).
It was announced a few months ago https://github.com/blog/1236-searching-and-filtering-stars
Very soon, besides being able to sort by popularity/star count, you will be able to sort (and search) by created date, updated date, and forks.
Also, there have been some requests to make this more service agnostic outside of just github.
So those are some points that hopefully make it more useful than github's current search functionality.
Now using GitHub for user credentials makes things even worse. Soon we'll see horror stories involving github being down ...
Based on its support of tags/searching, I'd imagine Gitrep is being responsible here though.
So you can tag stuff (granted, quite useful) and search tags? Is this more useful that googling what you want/need?
this hopes to centralize the search for good repos, instead of having to turn to a generalized search engine, and ideally add some functionality that facilitates the search (search/sort by created date, updated date, popularity, find similar repos, etc.).
I did notice that the auto-completion of the tags is likely experiencing a missing table index as it seems to take quite awhile to find any matches. This could be as simple as increased DB usage from hitting HN, but it might be worth looking into.
One other suggestion I have, and I'm sure it's likely on the horizon, is to give users the ability to star/watch repos directly from the listings page. I've found some cool shit I'd like to star on the fly without having to jump over to github.
I happened upon a once-in-a-sign-up bug. Here are the steps to reproduce (I cannot reproduce it anymore as it will only happen the first time you need to allow gitrep access to your github profile):
1. Sign in to gitrep. 2. Allow gitrep access to your github profile. 3. Hit the back button until it asks you to allow gitrep access to your github profile again. 4. Hit allow. 5. Notice 500 error.
I'll start answering questions as quickly as I can, it's the only thanks I can offer now for everyone melting my servers!
Very quickly some technical specs (going to write a post on this in more depth soon):
It's a ruby on rails application hosted on heroku. Unit testing with rspec, webmock, vcr, machinist, and capybara. Authentication is with devise obviously, with omniauth-github, and cancan and rolfy for authorization. Unicorn since it's awesome, and asynchronous jobs are taken care of by sidekiq. fragment caching is done with dalli/memcached. database is postgres, redis, and memcached, with monitoring by newrelic and logging by loggly and papertrail. Let me know if you have any questions!
Mobile search view is a little cluttered, and the sort dropdown doesn't seem to be changeable.
I noticed a typo in the About copy on the main page: "along with apply personal tags" should be "along with applying personal tags"
