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Comment by d0m | Hacker News Reader

I see the effort behind this project but I have to admit that I find it a bit useless. I've never had any problems finding anything related to jquery's documentation. I simply google and the top3 results is practically always the official documentation, a great stackoverflow answer, or a blog explaining in detail what I'm looking for.

But, maybe it's just the way I work; I can understand that other developers might prefer to have a great resource that they can look up instead of randomly searching google.

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However, something I've struggled a little more related to jquery is finding and using the plugin. The official plugin website is really not optimal and it's hard to find the "best" plugin when you're looking for something.

I guess an unofficial jquery plugin website where you could easily:

  1- Find a couple of plugin that do what you want
 
  2- Let you try the demo as fast as possible 
 
  3- Let you glance over the code, see comments and rating of others developers. 
 
  4- Have an easy and clear: Crash 30 sec installation
 
  5- Give an access to the documentation.

This is the order I usually execute when searching for a jquery plugin.. it's just that each of those steps are sometime unnecessary hard. I.e. multiple versions on the jquery, hard to find the real website of the plugin, have to look github issues to see other comments, demo page not working or deprecated, hard to see the "Installation and quick example", etc.

Yes, this is the real problem. The core jQuery documentation is nicely organized by category, and if I can't find something by browsing I can find it by using a Google search of the site.

The plugins though are a mess. Any category I click on seems to have a huge list of options, some of which are great and some of which are sort of half finished and abandoned. Even if anyone could submit anything for display on the site, it might be nice to have an additional organizational layer on top that only shows a curated set of plugins. I just find something like http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ easier to browse through. I think most of the organizational concepts between the sites are the same, but there just seems to be less cruft there.

I think what is needed is a (crowd-sourced) list of 'similar plugin' links, using metric such as ratings or number of downloads for ranking.

This works on the Chrome Extensions website, you quickly skip over the unmaintained plugins and the ones with no reviews. https://chrome.google.com/webstore?hl=en&category=ext

Absolutely agree. It's quite funny, when you google something like "jQuery lightbox plugin", you will actually see (spammy) results like "30 Efficient jQuery Lightbox Plugins", as if for some reason I need to know about 30 different plugins that do the same thing... I'd love to see a site as described, especially if it integrated with GitHub to tell me which plugins are more active/maintained, more often forked, etc. That information, in addition to reviews and usage examples would be amaaazing

I really understand you point of view, since I guess I work in a similar manner. Now, I may find the downloadable version of this project really useful when I have to work offline, which happens more often than I would like to.

Which got me thinking about how useful an offline version of google would be. Unrealistic or impossible?

What if you could download a "Google for JavaScript" where, based on lots of javascript developers query, you downloaded a cached version of the results and the websites?

I.e. It's easy to get the top 100000 queries containing javascript; you get the top20 links for every queries, you download those websites and compress that. I don't know how big that'd be. I'm sure it'd be possible to use that in a clever way and make it small enough to be easy downloadable. A couple of gigs.. what's that for today?

I think theres a lot of development yet to be done with limited or no connectivity. Git really changed how people can program offline.

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