Show HN: A directory of single-page sites and useful apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A directory of single-page sites and useful apps

thetoolbox.cc

164 pointssgdesign33 comments

I would love the ability to create my own toolbox based off of the sites you link. The basic idea would be I login, select the sites that I use and then can see them via my account, or link other people via citricsquid.thetoolbox.cc or something. For now I can load up the page and scroll through and remember which are useful with relative ease, but if you get to the point where there are hundreds or thousands of tools listed then it'll be hard to find the ones I like.

Great work so far, submitted 2 sites.

Thanks for the suggestion, but that's a little outside the scope of the site. Plus, I have no clue how I'd even do that with a WordPress install…

But you're right that the site will be hard to browse once there's a lot of apps, so I'm planning better navigation and filtering features (for example, sort by most used).

Really sorry for the downtime… I thought my WordPress install was ready to go, but for some reason the caching plugin was not activated. So everything came crashing down under the traffic, and then I was unable to log back in the admin to enable caching.

I'm now talking with the PHPFog guys to add resources to the server, but it's taking some time…

The lesson here: never EVER run WordPress without caching. Triple check that's it's active before you do anything.

    I thought my WordPress install was ready to go, but for some reason the caching plugin was not activated.

Wordpress glitches just happen, it's ok. Your idea is really neat though, congrats and thanks for sharing.

And now that it's working I can't edit the title anymore to remove "under maintenance".

Oh well, you can't win them all I guess…

Not loading for me right now.

The web really needs the equivalent of an app store. Search engines don't do apps justice. They don't have enough content to index and are often difficult to crawl anyway, being JS-heavy. Chrome Web Store is a good start, but a place with reviews and ratings of browser-independent, no-install, interactive websites would be excellent.

That's a similar direction I'm headed in for http://www.iwaat.com. I think you'll see more sites like http://thetoolbox.cc being created since searching for web apps from google.com is painful. And I can confirm from experience that most web apps have a miniscule amount of content to index, especially compared to blogs and other sites where content-centric sites. However, when you combine a web app's on site content with relevant content from the rest of the web (social media, news, etc), there's enough data to build a halfway decent search engine.

The tough part of your vision is the store. Every web app has their own way of processing payments that would be tough to tie into a single site for an experience similar to Apple's App Store. Chrome Web Store would probably be best positioned to tackle this.

I don't know about "no-install"--I for one prefer the Chrome Web Store's model, because it gives users a definitive point (hitting install) where they can grant my app extra permissions for things like geolocation and increased local storage, rather than bothering them with fifty different prompts once the app is running (and giving them the chance to refuse, even though my app won't work without those things enabled.) Personally, I'd prefer if other browsers just adopted the CWS's .crx app format, and every browser allowed app installation from sources other than its "own" store.

That's not trivial for them. Adopting "crx" means they wouldn't have any say in the evoluion. The point of the web is for a browser to be able to take the lead with something like CRX and then work with the other browsers to standardise it.

Anyway, the permissions question is independent of the store mechanism. iOS apps ask for permissions on demand, Android apps don't.

My main point about no-install is simply that they're regular websites, not downloadable packaged apps. There's room for both, but right now there's no good mechanism to find regular websites with apps on them.

OneForty.com (before being acquihired by HubSpot) tried to do this for Twitter apps - which were often just as you described: JS-Heavy, not terribly crawl able and they had what seemed a hard time of it.

Sorry, the site you're trying to access is busy! Error code 502

PHPFog

Sorry for the downtime, I'm looking into it. It seems I stupidly didn't activate the caching plugin I'm using :(

feeling a little bad for your server right now ...

Thanks for this great site - I hope it gets some traction and grows.

There are so many great sites/services out there that because I've forgotten about them. Having a simple index of sites like this will keep my memory about useful sites and help me discover new ones.

I really hope you are able to grow this site - i've added it to my Chrome bookmark bar!

Is Wordpress (along with a professional theme) the fastest route to a site as visually appealing as this one? In other words, what would other HN readers have chosen in order to deploy this content?

[1] http://designerthemes.com/themes/construct/

I picked WordPress because I knew I had bigger chances of finding a theme that already matched the design I wanted. Otherwise if I was coding the whole thing from scratch I'd probably use http://locomotivecms.com

Thanks! And keep up your site!

A couple more:

http://www.favicon.cc/

http://www.stripegenerator.com/

I don't think I've ever actually used the stripe generator, but there should definitely be at least one favicon site on there.

Thought of a few more things to add:

http://validator.w3.org/

One of the browser testing tools: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/07/a-dozen-cross-bro...

http://www.pythonregex.com/

Are you taking suggestions? I'd love to see Bookshrink [0] and Who Will I Know There? [1] on the list :)

[0] http://bookshrink.com

[1] http://wwikt-peterldowns.dotcloud.com

Bookshrink is a very interesting concept, but I'm really trying to feature things that are useful and practical for a majority number of people, not just "interesting" sites. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Another suggestion: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/cssgradientbackgr...

IE's gradient builder, I find it nicer than the colorzilla one.

Intrigued by Markup.io. I think I'll probably add this to my arsenal. http://markup.io/v/0fk6myfx7wk5

If you're taking contributions it'd be great if Backup Box [0] was included.

[0] https://mybackupbox.com

Excellent, bookmarked.

Feature suggestion: a suggestion box for people to request tools they would like to have but don't seem to exist.

Seems not able to load website right now.

More specifically, for me: Chromium says "This webpage has a redirect loop".

This is awesome - a number of tools i've never seen before. I think i'll find them very handy.

Love it. Especially the companion article about the proecess to set up thetoolbox.cc

Well done!

Feel free to suggest missing sites, either here or via the submission form.

i think you might want a better font for the "I use it" links, they were difficult to read on my screen (it could also be the contrast between the text color and button color)

I just increased the contrast, thanks for the feedback!

notepad.cc absolutely belongs here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com