So I used this rainy weekend in Prague to make Elm Finder a little better. It can already compare and categorize packages. This time I wanted to fix three problems that bothered me.
First one was Angular. Because for reasons unknown to me it took over every form on a page which I needed to use for feature described later So I replaced it with Elm. New compiled JS is half as big as it was before. I don’t use it for anything fancy. It just handles search results and nothing else.
Second is update checker. I know we already have elm-json. But I wanted to see how hard it is to parse elm.json and build the same thing but on the web. It turned out to be pretty simple once you have all package data needed. Everything uploaded to the site is used only to show you what you need and nothing else. Files are not logged for later use.
Third and the biggest is docs section for evry library. I noticed this problem with Duck Duck Go. It doesn’t index Elm pages. There are few things I could do. Use !g for redirect to Google. !elm that redirects to Elm search. Which is great but I still want to see Elm docs on Duck Duck go. So I chose the hardest option and scraped Elm Packages and parsed data from there. That turned out to be quite challenging. Mainly because I needed to parse Markdown before I convert it to HTML. Links to Elm pacakges are still there. This is mainly a hotfix and if this is not appreciated by the community I will happily take it down.
