
Introducing (Unofficial) GitHub Buttons  - dwynings
http://www.markdotto.com/2011/11/26/introducing-unofficial-github-buttons/
======
andrewdavey
Also check out <http://gitforked.com/>

I made it earlier this year, but didn't get the HN love :)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279450>

~~~
zeratul
Both bottons look elegant. Probably your botton was posted at a wrong time of
a day. That's why I've made an app that tells you when it's good time to post
a story. Today 9am, a lot of newest stories were upvoted quickly - biggest
peak in over two weeks.

It would be nice if clicking the button made you a watcher.

------
yahelc
One problem I see with this: Some people are going to see buttons that are
identical in style to Twitter follow buttons, and assume that clicking it will
"Watch" the repo.

For some subset of the population, they'll either not notice they didn't
actually Watch the repo (and hence be a lost Watcher for your project), or
they'll notice, be annoyed, and assume its a bug.

~~~
kmfrk
I actually thought they did that, until you wrote that comment.

------
switz
All this does is statically link the user to the GitHub page. It does not
actually "Watch" the repo when you hit Watch. While nice, it's just a
glorified link. The counter is the only real feature here.

~~~
zmanji
I really wish github would develop a web intents api like Twitter. Then one
can watch repos and follow other users much like the follow bottons for
twitter.

------
mike-cardwell
If you want to see how many watchers/forks a project has, it's easy enough to
pull down the data yourself:

    
    
      mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Watchers" '|tail -1
                  10
      mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Forks" '|tail -1
                  2
      mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ 
    

Then you can use a locally hosted image and embed the counters in your own
content. We're only talking a couple of lines of code here.

------
Thomaschaaf
I love that the website looks like a face.

The eyes are the watch and fork buttons, the nose is the download on github
and it has a little mustache being the bottom watch and fork buttons. Also the
hair seems to be the "GitHub Buttons"-Text. Hopefully that's not just me :D

------
ms123
It's worth mentioning 'css3buttons' project which does the same thing in a
really elegent way.

<https://github.com/michenriksen/css3buttons>

------
mdellanoce
Another similar project: <http://octophile.com>

It is for followers only, but clicking the button will follow the user like
Twitter's follow button does

