

Gitrep - Discover and organize Github repositories   - zellux
http://gitrep.com/

======
brandoncor
Funny, I owned this domain until July of this year and was planning to build
the exact same thing. I was in my "have an idea, get excited, buy the domain,
do nothing, let it expire" phase.

Glad to see you picked it up and actually built and launched.

~~~
sevenadrian
ha, thanks! I knew I was lucky with a useful 6 letter domain. If you have any
ideas that you had wanted to implement but don't see please let me know!

and thanks for the domain brandon!

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wise_young_man
I like where this is going. I blogged about this very topic a few months ago
<http://derekmyers.com/open-source-information-overload>. If you watch/star as
many repos as I do then you realize the problem is clear. Discovering and
filtering repos is incredibly difficult, but the vast resources are there and
growing at an even more incredible rate.

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random sites discovering outdated "10 popular plugins for Bootstrap" kind of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.

~~~
sevenadrian
awesome, thanks wise young man, this is exactly one of the problems I
personally experienced that I was hoping to solve.

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!

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mamcx
You know what I love to know? Which branch is the most uptodate! The network
page of github is slow and hard to see what is going on.

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...

~~~
seliopou
On GitHub there's a "Branches" tab for each repo which lists how many commits
ahead or behind master each branch is. Sounds like it's close to what you're
looking for.

~~~
5vforest
I think s/he means "Which fork is most up-to-date?"

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xbryanx
I was really hoping that this would be a service that would allow me to
organize my private repositories into folders. I know I can do this with
submodules, but I was hoping for an easy user interface. I'm guessing this is
an area where you could make money, until GitHub solves the problem.

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.

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troutwine
This sounds neat!

> 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?

~~~
sevenadrian
creator here!

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).

~~~
mesm
I hope to see something like alternativeto.net too, were you can link multiple
items and compare facts about them. I realize this is what can be done with
the tags. It can be easier to see which programs are similar than coming up
with a unique tag for them though.

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DanielRibeiro
Cool. But how is it different from Github's own <https://github.com/stars> ?

It was announced a few months ago <https://github.com/blog/1236-searching-and-
filtering-stars>

~~~
sevenadrian
you can add tags, instead of just searching based on language (and
description). Hopefully as things begin the flesh out, you will be able to
more easily find other similar repos and repos of interest (through the
"similar repos by tags" and "similar repos by stars"/"users who star this repo
all star these other repos" functionality).

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.

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niggler
This would be far more useful as a general curated open source database if
github access were not required (one useful side effect is that, when it is
down the next time, gitrep would still be up). Then it would be possible to
specify alternative repo locations

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Hawkee
Very good to see more sites utilizing the GitHub API. I do have a few comments
to make though. First, you mention badges on the homepage, but this feature
isn't complete so I don't think its even necessary to mention it yet. Second,
the search is somewhat confusing. I'd love just a single search box at the top
of the site where I can type whatever I'd like. Maybe make the current search
the "Advanced Search". Third, I probably wouldn't emphasize the tagging so
much. I'd probably never tag anything and rely entirely on the data you're
gathering from GitHub. I think it's much better to focus on the sorting
algorithm and how easy it is to find popular repos.

~~~
niggler
IMHO it's a bad thing. Too many projects and services depend on github so that
downtime represents a systemic risk (homebrew was unusable during the downtime
last week). Sure, you have your code backed up, but you don't necessarily have
your issue tracker or gists backed up.

Now using GitHub for user credentials makes things even worse. Soon we'll see
horror stories involving github being down ...

~~~
Hawkee
You can say the same for Twitter, Facebook and Google. There is always the
potential for downtime, but users generally don't want to create more
accounts. I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Plus, sites that
use GitHub logins are much more appealing to developers rather than sites that
use Facebook or Twitter logins.

~~~
niggler
Haha Facebook. On 90% of show HN posts involving Facebook logins the top or
second to top comment is something like "Facebook login is a nonstarter"

~~~
Hawkee
I can understand that if a facebook login is required, but offering it as a
choice shouldn't be frowned upon.

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thomseddon
Just signed up, really love the design both front end and once logged in
however I'm not really sure what to do with it?

So you can tag stuff (granted, quite useful) and search tags? Is this more
useful that googling what you want/need?

~~~
sevenadrian
hard to say if it is more or less useful, but hopefully easier (and therefor
more useful).

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.).

------
addandsubtract
This is godsent. I have over 100 starred repos for various reasons and the
only sorting github allows is through language. So naturally, finding old
repos is extremely tedious. I'm going to start using this right away.

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jqueryin
Very cool. I publicly tagged at least 25 things as I went through my starred
list.

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.

------
bink-lynch
Nice work! That I can organize repositories by my own tags seems very useful
and I second the "most up-to-date fork" feature request.

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.

------
sevenadrian
thanks for the interest everyone! This is my project that I just launched,
thought I'd say hello!

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!

------
rabialam
Awesome! Such a pain point that needs an actual solution -- I'm honestly
pretty underwhelmed with GitHub for not providing this kind of functionality
in the first place. Glad someone took the initiative to do something not just
cool, but so very necessary with the GitHub API.

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jimmytucson
FYI (@ 11:09 AM EST): an error occurred in the application and 'gitreb.com'
could not be served.

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Twidi
Same idea as <http://repos.io> ?

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AdamGibbins
This is awesome, thank you. I've got 300 starred repos which renders the
entire system effectively useless as I cannot find anything. Gitrep looks like
it'll fix this awesomely, thanks!

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mctx
Neat!

Mobile search view is a little cluttered, and the sort dropdown doesn't seem
to be changeable.

<http://imgur.com/KNl9t.jpg>

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arms
Nice idea and implementation.

I noticed a typo in the About copy on the main page: "along with apply
personal tags" should be "along with applying personal tags"

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kylemaxwell
Seems like it's already been slashdotted (HNed?). I spend too much time trying
to do this manually and really hope that this works out, though!

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rjsamson
Pretty cool - as someone with probably way too many starred repositories its
nice to have the ability to organize them.

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aleem
Couldn't read the repos listing on my Iphone the display was quite mangled.
Will check again when I'm near a laptop.

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DannoHung
Please add some tag filtering tools on the left of the user page. A little tag
cloud would be nice, for example.

~~~
sevenadrian
like a personal tag cloud that applies just to the tags of that users starred
repos? actually that's not a bad idea

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paullth
Sweeet, can't believe github still dont have something like this

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jhgaylor
Bravo! I've already found 4 new awesome projects to follow.

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lpinca
Like the design.

