Show HN: Find Free and Open Source Software – Awsmfoss | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find Free and Open Source Software – Awsmfoss

awsmfoss.com

I was immediately concerned with the UX of just having a giant list with no screenshots, but the right taglines turn it in to a rather pleasant “perusing” experience. You don’t know what you don’t know so perusing is a decent solution to discoverability and I discovered a couple things that I’m going to install.

This caught my eye though: “Cusdis is an open source, lightweight alternative to Cusdis that's easy to use and values user privacy.”. Typo or hallucination?

You’re absolutely right, what I need to add to the site desperately is search :(

Also all these come from my personal list of bookmarks, with some that were suggested by outside people (there is a form), so the project started as me just trying to get them out there for someone else to benefit from.

> This caught my eye though: “Cusdis is an open source, lightweight alternative to Cusdis that's easy to use and values user privacy.”. Typo or hallucination?

Typo! Anna wrote that one and while we use AI we do it somewhat intentionally (the “as written by AI” section. I’ll fix that typo today

Personally I don’t think it needs search but if you really want search short-term: you can add a simple JS filter function that filters on-page without needing a backend.

I’d suggest two tweaks if you go that way: 1) Start the filtering only when number of typed characters >=3. 2. Add a (probably hidden) field that is also searched so you manually add search terms to a project and have it show up as a related item.

Oh yeah 100% I’m going build the search before and load it client side, probably with lunr.js or something similar. This is not worth rolling out a full search engine for!

Thanks for the suggestion, I think calculation will happen all client side so… after one character is probably fine especially with a small enough index

Cool. Shouldn't this be an open-source website? If yes, I could not find it anywhere.

Put in a table with filters and categories instead of this lazy loading, it renders the whole list useless for anything beyond casual look up.

You’re not wrong, if only I had a decent Ghost template… I’ll try and find one.

Short of that I need to rewrite the site into something I can properly control (probably Astro/Sveltekit)

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