Filtering and ranking 1740 Meteor apps

In the previous article, I used all the 1740 URLs I’ve scraped to extract some statistics. But it’s so easy to deploy apps with Meteor that it’s obvious that lots of them are “hello world” apps. In the end, the stats doesn’t reflect what real app use.

In this article, I’ll explain what I did to have a better list of Meteor apps and which one has the best ranking.

Remove sites without dedicated domains

If your app uses a subdomain of meteor.com or herokuapp.com, there’s lot of chance that it’s not a real app. Of course, it removes some apps like paris.meteor.com but in general, it’s more often things like meteor-book-chapter10–5.meteor.com or mother-test-b.meteor.com.

With this filter, we have 735 URLs.

Alexa

I use the Alexa undocumented API to get the ranks of all those 735 websites. This is a great way to sort apps and see which one have traffic.

171 URLs don’t even have Alexa rank. But as we’ll see in a future article, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t great.

Now we’ve the ranked URLs, I’m sure you want to know which one has the best rank? Let’s see that now…

And the winner is…

royanews.tv. What?!, you don’t know this app? I follow everything related to Meteor since 0.6, 2 years ago, and I also never heard about this website.

Alex global rank is 17,788 and it’s the 17th biggest website in Jordan, before amazon or LinkedIn! Wow!

To compare, meteor.com is 15,715 and atmospherejs.com is 69,557.

Of course, I looked at the source code, and yes, it’s a real Meteor app using Meteor 0.9.1.1.

When looking at the source, we immediately see that it uses fast render package to be able to display the news on the homepage quickly (congrats Arunoda).

The second thing we see, it uses kadira to track analytics (congrats again Arunoda).

Here is the full package list:

[“underscore”, “meteor”, “json”, “ejson”, “logging”, “reload”, “tracker”, “random”, “retry”, “check”, “id-map”, “ordered-dict”, “geojson-utils”, “minimongo”, “ddp”, “follower-livedata”, “application-configuration”, “mongo”, “autoupdate”, “meteor-platform”, “localstorage”, “jquery”, “htmljs”, “observe-sequence”, “reactive-var”, “blaze”, “accounts-base”, “sha”, “srp”, “accounts-password”, “http”, “deps”, “mrt:cookies”, “reactive-dict”, “templating”, “iron:core”, “ui”, “iron:dynamic-template”, “iron:layout”, “iron:router”, “arunoda:find-faster”, “meteorhacks:kadira-binary-deps”, “meteorhacks:kadira”, “meteorhacks:meteorx”, “meteorhacks:unblock”, “meteorhacks:fast-render”, “webapp”, “session”, “livedata”, “spacebars”, “service-configuration”]

If you remove default Packages, nothing very fancy left, lot of meterohacks (Arunoda, you developed it? ☺) packages, iron router (of course) and that’s all.

We also see that all Collections are inside an object called Collections:

[“ads_content_article”, “ads_content_related_articles”, “ads_content_caricature”, “ads_content_video”, “ads_content_weather_video”, “single_dynamic_sections”, “ads_top”, “ads_top_mobile”, “ads_home_local”, “ads_home_weather”, “ads_home_accidents”, “ads_home_writers”, “ads_home_economy”, “ads_home_sports”, “ads_home_here_and_there”, “ads_home_health”, “ads_home_palestine”, “ads_sidebar_live_updates”, “ads_sidebar_articles”, “ads_sidebar_videos”, “ads_sidebar_weather_videos”, “ads_sidebar_caricature”, “ads_sidebar_from_us”, “ads_sidebar_from_you”, “ads_sidebar_obituaries”, “ads_sidebar_related_articles”, “articles_list”, “caricature_list”, “date”, “videos_list”, “weather_videos_list”, “writers_list”, “images”, “folders”]

I wonder why they created one Collection for each type of ads instead of having one Collection with all ads and a type.

There’s lot of other things we can see in the source code, but I let you find them by yourselves.

Conclusion

I was really happy to discover that the best Alexa ranked Meteor website was unknown to me. If you knew it, please comment here!

we regularly read people saying that Meteor is not production ready, It’s nice to see this Meteor B2C application that seems to have some traffic, at least in Jordan. I would love to know the real traffic they have and read a postmortem about the development and production of this app.

I’ll regularly post articles about security, nice packages, cool websites made with Meteor so don’t forget to subscribe to the Meteor Secret newsletter. You can also read all the previous articles on Meteor Secret Medium collection.

PS: I just released fastosphere command line to fast & smart search Meteor packages right inside your terminal, try it: npm -g install fastosphere