On Gist Discovery
February 2, 2012 § 2 Comments
GitHub is awesome. No doubt about it. It has made code fun and exciting again. I know that I wouldn’t be involved in the open source community without it. I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog without it. I mainly started this blog as a way to get out some more info out about some of my gems that I had written. Being able to link to repos and have a repo’s landing page be a good landing page has been huge. As I have be working on this blog I find myself more fascinated by snippets of code than with whole repositories.
Which is why I love gists.
Gists are great ways to share pieces of code that don’t need their own full GitHub repo. The only problem is that there is no good way to find all of that awesome code. There really needs to be a way to browse through gists. Sort them by language type or allow people to tag them. GitHub could even intelligently autotag a bunch of stuff. Right now gists are only really useful if you link to them from an outside location or embed them on in your blog.
There is a lot of great and useful code out there. We just need to be able to find it easier.
The On Blog 
Good point. Is there an API to get get the title of a gist and it’s contents? If so, a gist search engine should be a weekend-scale project.
1) build crawler
2) use syntax highlighers to extract all contents
3) put info into sphinx/mysql
4) happily search on your way.
They do have a gist api: http://developer.github.com/v3/. And it has a 5000 queries an hour rate limit. That 120k a day. Hmmmm… Maybe it’d be worth just pulling in a few thousand and see what kind of tagging and browsing you can get done that way.