One of my favorite GitHub features is the ability to find and track the progress of projects that interest me. I’ve decided to post the new projects I find each month on this blog since there is a high likelihood that you and I have common interests (Hey, I’m curating something on the internet!).

So I wrote a little script using the GitHub API to track which new projects I watch during each month. I watched 17 new projects in January. They are linked below along with their authors’ descriptions and some commentary of my own:

BirdWatch - “Twitter search client written in MacRuby” I’m dying to give MacRuby a go, especially now that it has hit 0.5.

CPVideoKit - “Cappuccino & Objective-J wrapper for the YouTube JavaScript API.” I love all the stuff coming out of the Cappuccino community lately.

Cappuccino-Test-Extensions - “A group of extensions, classes, and more that aid developers in testing Cappuccino applications.”

EKImageReflection - “With EKImageReflection you can extend a regular CPImageView for displaying a reflection on it’s bottom.”

PNGSquash - “A PNG compressor app for OS X.” Great tool for pre-processing images for web use.

coffee-script - “Unfancy JavaScript.” This is easily the most active project I follow. Dude codes all day and night.

delayed_paperclip - “Process your Paperclip attachments in the background with delayed_job.” A nice implementation joining two of my favorite Rails-related gems.

has_scope - “Maps controller filters to your resource scopes.” Super-useful for filtering on index actions.

jQuery-Lint - “jQuery Lint is a simple script you can download and use with jQuery. It works over the top of jQuery and diligently reports errors and any incorrect usage of jQuery.” - I want this to support Web Inspector.

jubilator - “Browse public GitHub repos in style!” Great for when you don’t want to clone a repo just to grok its source.

makers-mark - “Syntax highlight your markdown.” Could be useful for statically generated blogging.

nested_form - “Rails plugin to conveniently handle multiple models in a single form.” ‘Nuff said.

node-mongodb-native - “Mongo DB Native NodeJS Driver.” Two technologies I’m looking for an excuse to play with.

rack-rewrite - “A web server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules.”

showoff - “the best damn presentation software a developer could ever love.” Bold claim. We’ll see.

twitter-node - “node.js lib that creates a streaming connection with twitter and pushes any incoming statuses to a tweet event.” Could be a good learning tool.

webme - “Convert your README into a Website.” Uhm, yes please!

That wraps it up for January. I hope you find one or more of these open-source projects interesting. Stay tuned for next month’s list and follow me on GitHub to follow along!