purpleturtle's comments

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Libscore: A PageRank for JavaScript Libraries

builtwith doesn't show all js libs. it just whitelists the top 20 i believe. looks like Wapanalyzer might be similar.

alexa is also unrelated to broad js penetration detection.

not sure how ghostery is relevant.

the novelty of libscore is that it detects all js libs (even brand new ones with only 20 sites using it); doesn't use a dumb whitelist filter.

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Libscore: A PageRank for JavaScript Libraries

Unlike celebrity culture, popularity in the open source world translates to actual impact on the web. As an author of a popular library, your code plays a direct part in how other developers structure their codebase, and -- depending on the library -- the end user experience.

And, yeah, impact/change/popularity (whatever you want to call it) is certainly a main reason behind releasing and maintaining open source software. Perhaps other dominant reasons include giving users differently opionionated alternatives that better suit their workflow, advancing the technical know-how of a field, and simply experimenting for expressiveness' sake.

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Libscore: A PageRank for JavaScript Libraries

npm actually publishes its own top lists.

what's interesting about the work we've done on libscore is that it shows the end result -- whether a lib was actually ultimately used on a site. npm can tell you download stats, but that's where its data ends.

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Introducing Libscore: A PageRank for JavaScript Libraries

Good points :)

The problem was that fuzzy search would have been technically overwhelming to implement due to the size of our data sets (1 million sites * avg. # of leaked global variables). Also, it would have resulted in a lot of confusing matches because of how arbitrary JavaScript variable names are.

Keeping it to one-for-one case sensitive lookups was the only way to clearly express searching behavior and return accurate data every time. The downside is that we force people to read our homepage how-to to learn how to use it :)

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Libscore

One of the creators of Libscore here. I want to sincerely thank Stripe for making this project happen. I am still elated that they were willing to back this crazy idea of mine.

Libscore isn't perfect, but it sufficiently serves its purpose of competitive analysis. I've written more about the intentions of the project, including a thorough analysis of its downsides, here: https://medium.com/@Shapiro/introducing-libscore-com-be93165...

purpleturtle | 11 years ago | on: Velocity.js

Fear not. Your performance concerns are mostly unwarranted (creator or Velocity here). Here are some articles to consider reading that help debunk this myth:

http://css-tricks.com/myth-busting-css-animations-vs-javascr...

http://davidwalsh.name/css-js-animation

http://www.sitepoint.com/incredibly-fast-ui-animation-using-...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/09/04/animating-without...

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/look-and-feel...

For what it's worth, Velocity is a fairly new library. I wouldn't have gone down the path of JavaScript-based animation had my research and testing demonstrated that it was appreciably inferior in any way.

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