BEAM Toolbox released in Alpha

[Josh Adams]

So last night I got the first release of BEAM Toolbox live and decent-looking, at http://beam-toolbox.com.

It definitely has some issues still, but they will be minor.  Its features at present consist of:

• Synchronizes with hex.pm, so new packages will show up on the BEAM Toolbox within the hour
• Commenting on a given project using Disqus
• if a github link exists, fetches github data including the README, number of forks, number of stars, last commit

Next focus is to make it a bit prettier and to get some scoring system in place, as well as to do some things using database operations that I'm currently doing in-memory.

Also, Dave Cottlehuber has suggested perhaps it ought to be backed by CouchDB, which I'm currently in the process of trying to turn into him modifying the data backend for me :)  I'm all for it.

It's open source.  It consists of two projects:

• https://github.com/knewter/beam_toolbox_data
  
• https://github.com/knewter/beam_toolbox_web
  

There's another project under my user called beam_toolbox, but that's an older first-draft version of the site that's going away and does not represent the live site.

Thanks, PRs welcome and please give me suggestions :)  There's a link in the footer to open an issue - I'll gladly accept suggestions for categorization, etc. there :)

-Josh Adams

[Wojciech Kaczmarek]

This is nice :]

One thing about rendering project descriptions - can some of the formatting be retained? I for example have multi-paragraph description and then it goes squeezed a bit... http://beam-toolbox.com/categories/code_reloading 

I see also other project descriptions have markdown which looks ok when displayed by hex, but dirty in a project summary like here: http://beam-toolbox.com/projects/hound

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[Josh Adams]

I'm going to apply markdown to the description soon, which is seemingly what people are using for their description often (I guess hex supports this?)

Part of the problem is I don't really want multiline stuff showing up in the index view, for when people make a very large description.  Might truncate at 500 chars or newline for the index page (listing multiple projects), then markdown on the project show.  Would that satisfy?  If so, I'll make an issue (also if you guys have other suggestions, issues on github will make it easier for me to track this stuff) :)

Thanks for the feedback.

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Josh Adams

[Josh Adams]

Lulz I broke it briefly guys, forgot to cache the github readme so I'm rate limited there at the moment.  Pushing a fix this very moment, will be broken until github trusts our IP again :)

[Wojciech Kaczmarek]

Thanks for a quick response! :)

I think for the in-category listing of packages a sane default would be to use only first sentence of the description - like you said, trunc at the first newline character.

[Dave Thomas]

Cool work.

Will you be adding search at some point?

Dave

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[Josh Adams]

Yup, just going to build out some more features first.  Will put it in the issues tracker.

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Josh Adams

[hen...@nyh.se]

Since Josh's site is no longer active, I'm working on a new BEAM Toolbox site: http://toolbox.elixir.pm

I've checked that Josh is OK with it, of course.

I'll make a more announcy announcement when it's a little further along (see its GitHub issues for some possible future plans) but I figured I'd mention it here. I would say the site is at a useful stage (not alpha/beta) but could do with a little more polish.

[hen...@nyh.se]

> GitHub issues

Namely: https://github.com/henrik/toolbox/issues