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Improvements to the Library

Ah yes, the library. The library only has 13 regular expressions in it at the moment. So I've been working on making it more compelling to contribute.

A couple weeks ago I added a tagging system and incorporated a faceted search engine for the library visible from the website.

Library Faceted Search

Only I have control over the tags for now as I'm still building out all of the interfaces. But this is one way to filter the regular expressions that I'll be relying on heavily as the list grows.

Then just this weekend I refined the list inside the tester itself (soon I'll add tags and sorting to this as well):
Public Library

And I built out a voting mechanism:
Library Voting

The voting mechanism will only appear for regular expressions out of the public library that are not your own. And it'll slide away after you vote. This should make it much more convenient to vote, and hopefully more compelling for developers to contribute as a result.

Coming up next I'll have a points and badges system in place. You may notice a trend here. These are all very StackOverflow-like community features. I'm certainly not trying to compete with StackOverflow. I mean, my site is not a Q&A site. But I do like the way they do quite a lot of things. They've done a great job at making it fun to help people. So I'm hoping to accomplish something similar. In the end, the more quality regular expressions we have in the library, the more useful it'll be. So I think it only makes sense for me to build out a good system to handle it. And then I've been toying with the idea of creating a contest to encourage more community involvement. Stay tuned for updates.
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