Your "Awesome" list sucks. Make it better with GistMarks.
Tags: watercooler, javascript, webdev, developers
Published: 2021-04-13 15:06:32

---
title: Your "Awesome" list sucks. Make it better with GistMarks.
published: true
description: Awesome lists kind of suck. Here's how to make them better.
tags: watercooler, javascript, webdev, developers
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/r2qd236gl8k9zfjjhgjy.png
---
Awesome Lists are **awesome**, but they also kind of suck, let me explain. While the idea behind the awesome list is great, the implementation is less than ideal. Here we have all these bookmarks, yet the best format we can come up with to store all of these bookmarks is: a README??

## The Problem with Awesome Lists

Say you create a huge list of resources to help someone build a React application, I spend all this time building an awesome list but in the end I hit a few limitations

💥 You can't search them: Sure you could CTRL+F but that's less than ideal for searching a huge document

💥 Categorization is hard: You can create categories in your list but there's no easy way for users to filter by those categories. A table of contents makes things a little easier but that means users will have to scroll all the way back up to the TOC to navigate to another section.

💥 Mobile Support: Anyone can view your awesome list on their phone, but unless you're careful about formatting, they might just see a complete mess.

💥 Inaccessible data format: Everyone format's their awesome lists a bit differently. This means that if you want to create  tool to aggregate them, you're going to be dealing with a ton of incompatible formats.

The result of all of this is even though your awesome list may be packed with awesome resources, few will benefit from it because just finding the right stuff on that list is hard. And if you want to spend the time building an awesome list with good navigation, you're going to spend more time on formatting them you will on actually adding good content to the list. So what's the solution? 

## Enter Gistmarks

![Gistmarks](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/i2ikh9ks6dku0dy8f1vm.png)

I built Gistmarks out of an internal need to share bookmark collections. My company has alot of disparate sites on our intranet and tracking them down means spending time tracking those links down, scrolling through slack messages and email threads. Gistmarks solves this problem by letting anyone create a bookmark collection and then sharing it with whoever they want. With Gistmarks every team was able to create their own collection of bookmarks, internal dashboards, code repositories, etc and then share it with other, drastically cutting down the time it took to find a link to that internal tool you needed.

But as I was building Gistmarks I realized there are many more use cases for such a tool, namely Awesome Lists. Whenever you build an Awesome List with Gistmarks, your list is now sorted by category, searchable, has all the UI elements needed for good navigation and your data is stored in a consistent format that can be then used by others.

Check out some awesome lists created with Gistmarks:

[Workout Collection](https://app.gistmarks.io/v/3fca793689a21f0bbef8279b9249b297)


[Cooking Collection](https://app.gistmarks.io/v/d9a1fb8f0f305e586f76856e88caadf4)


[Dev Team Collection](https://app.gistmarks.io/v/bdd7ae5cd6376591742e2fbb68ecfe24)


[React Resources Collection](https://app.gistmarks.io/v/74c4f084e6aba53feb92586eeb3cafae)


## Make your awesome lists more awesome today. 

Gistmarks is free to use. Get started creating bookmark collections with GistMarks today.

[Gistmarks](https://gistmarks.io)