gittop, an iPhone app for watching people and repositories on GitHub written by jfahrenkrug, is now available on the App Store.

Nice work, Johannes!

Going to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this year? We’ll see you there.

Our talk (Socializing Development) will be on Friday, April 3rd at 11am in room 2003.

Guess who received a shipment of 2,000 GitHub stickers a few weeks ago! Me, baby, me. And these are high quality vinyl stickers, sure to last to the end of time itself.

I know a lot of you want stickers, so here’s what I’m going to do, just for you. For ONE WEEK ONLY I will mail stickers to anyone that asks. Just email me at tom@github.com like so:

• Put [sticker] in the subject line so I can easily identify sticker requests.
• Put your FULL ADDRESS in the body. I will send stickers anywhere in the world, so make sure to include your full country info if you’re outside the USA. I will literally write what you put in your email on the envelope, so don’t mess it up!
• Tell me how many stickers you want. If you’re only going to use one, only ask for one. If you have a users group or something and want to pass some out, I can send a few more, but not more than 10.
• If you’re running a conference and love GitHub so much that you want to give everyone a sticker, let me know and I can arrange to send you as many as you need.

You have until 11 March 2009 at 6pm PST to make your request, so don’t delay!

We’ll also be at RailsConf in Vegas May 4-7. Come to our GitHub panel and there will be lots of stickers available afterwards. Enjoy your Octocats!

One of the interesting side effects I hadn’t considered when we rolled out some fairly significant caching updates on GitHub in the beginning of January was how much Google’s crawler would take full advantage of the speed increase.

The graph lays it all out pretty clearly what happens when your site is more responsive. The number of pages the bot is able to index goes up dramatically when the time spent downloading the page is reduced dramatically. More pages indexed on Google inevitably means more revenue for us as our traffic grows, so this is a solid win beyond making sure existing GitHubbers are happy.

This is pretty cool. larrytheliquid has created a Gitorial on how to build a library in Clojure. TDD style.

Gitorial? Larry’s blog post explains the concept:

...this presentation was captured in the Git revision control system. Every commit has a commit message that explains the “next slide” of the presentation. People can then view diffs between commits to quickly see what changed

Navigate to the first page of the commit log and follow along. The real power, as Larry explains, comes from being able to checkout any revision and play with the code.

Once the repository has been downloaded, you are able to check out any particular revision. Because the library has passing tests at every commit (unless otherwise noted), you are able to create a branch and play with the code with the backing of tests.

Grab the Gitorial at https://github.com/larrytheliquid/buzzer. Thanks Larry!

Sorry I missed last week, hopefully I can get this out weekly from now on. As always, check out this guide to see what you can do to help your chances of getting noticed. Stats are on hold until next week until I figure out how to not make Octocat cry too much.

Featured Project

keywurl adds a keyword-based search to your Safari address bar. It also makes it easy to add your own commands for sites you want to search often. For instance, you could make a gh keyword that searches GitHub repositories instead of relying on the search bar or being on the site itself. Of course, it’s in Objective-C, and all the source is available if you want to see how plugins for Safari work. alexstaubo has even wrapped up some DMGs for easy installation along with a nice project site as well. This is a ridiculously useful tool for any OSX/Safari user, so check it out!

Notably New Projects

whenever provides a really easy way to write tasks that must be done repeatedly or at a certain time in a simple Ruby DSL. It can even write out crontab files for you based on the commands and times that you give it. Take a look at some examples of the syntax on the project’s wiki.

lawnelephant applies Seinfeld to websites: it’s a web application that does nothing! Well, really, it does so some stuff, and you can even suggest and vote on features that should be built in. What’s really crazy is that it’s all implemented in Scheme. Who knew feature creep could breed an entire website (on purpose)? It’s live at https://lawnelephant.com/ if you want to see it in action.

burst is for those who don’t like Flash and would rather use the Canvas element with some jQuery style chaining and callbacks. The goal of the project is to provide a layer-based animation system (like After Effects) that is easy to build great looking sites with. It’s got a decent start on documentation and it even has an awesome demo/home page. If you’re looking for alternatives to Flash or are willing to contribute to something that may prove useful to plenty of web developers, get forking! (Also, ASCII art in READMEs always rules.)

Lift, the simply functional web framework, has hit version 1.0. Congrats to dpp and all the contributors!

What is Lift? According to the website:

Lift is an expressive and elegant framework for writing web applications. Lift stresses the importance of security, maintainability, scalability and performance, while allowing for high levels of developer productivity. Lift open source software licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.

And oh yeah, it’s hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/dpp/liftweb.

Some of our friends in Minnesota will be participating in the F1 Web Challenge this weekend by creating a free website for a nonprofit.

Be sure to check out last year’s success story (for Little Brothers of Minnesota) as well as the team’s page.

Go team!

Cufón is fast text replacement with canvas and VML – no Flash or images required. Check the about page or usage page on the wiki for more infos. Of course, it’s hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/sorccu/cufon

People seem to love it.

Thanks sorccu!

sschroed has created git-phone, an open source GitHub iPhone app. Ever wanted to peek at an iPhone app’s source? Now’s your chance!

You can find more screen shots on the wiki.

Update peak => peek

There’s now an unofficial but updated Grails mirror at https://github.com/chanwit/grails. Follow along and never miss a commit!

We’re not sure but think that’s tapajos under the mask on the left.

I used to be really into the game of Go. I even made my own board once from a panel of Beech wood. Painted the lines and dots on it and everything. But all good games eventually end up on the internet, and it’s a pleasure to have found Dave Peck’s Go. It’s a Google App Engine implementation of the classic game, and I gave it a spin. I have to say I’m very impressed. It’s simple, just like it should be. For those long, epic games, you can set it to email each player after every turn, so you can play asynchronously. And the best part of all? It’s open source and right here on GitHub. Check out davepeck/appengine-go and maybe learn a thing or two!

If you’re new to Git and/or GitHub and want to take your skills to the next level, you’ll definitely want to check out Git and GitHub: A Free Course by our friends over at RubyLearning. The online course starts on 21st Feb. 2009 and runs for a week. The course topics are:

• What’s Version Control
• What’s Git
• Downloading and Installing Git
• Create your local repository folder
• Create your SSH Key
• What’s GitHub?
• Set up your GitHub account
• Creating a new repository
• Deleting and renaming repositories
• Fork a repository
• Push changes to a repository
• Clone a public project
• Add collaborators to a project
• Collaborate with other users
• Send a pull request
• Merge changes from a pull request
• Watch projects and people
• Use project wikis
• Create and delete branches and tags
• Generate RubyGems
• Create GitHub pages
• Exercises

Want to get on Rebase? Find out how.

Stats Breakdown

Featured Project

dynomite is an open-source Erlang implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo, a distributed key-data storage that strives for high availability. At Amazon, this system is used from everything from shopping carts to product catalogs, and handles millions of requests along with hundreds of thousands of transactions. Clearly, an open source version could become quite popular and be very useful to others. The project has some great resources including a guide to get started talking to the system through Ruby on their wiki. Fork away and read up on how it works if you’re interested.

Notably New Projects

ceo_campaign_contributions can catch one’s attention simply by its name. This repo hosts a Django app that displays a map of the US showing who gave how much to what candidate from the last election season and when. Ahh, democracy. You can see it on https://www.ceocampaigncontributions.info/

spike is a new OSX application for viewing log files from generated by Ruby on Rails. Usually some deep unix-fu is necessary to effectively extract information from large log files, but this app aims to make it simple, searchable, and fast. Make sure to watch this demo screencast on what it does so far.

diceshaker does exactly what its called, just on your iPhone. It’s a free application, and now the code has been made available here on GitHub! If you’re looking to get into iPhone development this could be a great example, and it’s definitely useful for those who forgot to bring their d20s to the campaign. Check out some screenshots here and fork it!