Open Source Ecosystems

##GitHub Watchers - An Embeddable GitHub 'Watchers' Button For External Pages ###Finally display and share the number of people watching a repository for sites outside of GitHub

These days we have share and follower buttons for almost everything, except GitHub. This projects provides a customizable JavaScript button (that uses the GitHub API) for pulling in the watcher counts for links to any repositories you may have on your page.

Updated for API V3

##Screenshots

##Getting Started

The bookmarklet supports three size modes and all you need to do to start using it is include github-watchers.js (or github-watchers-nologo.js for a smaller version without the GitHub logo) and simply select the class below you would like GitHub Watchers to size your button with.

The three size modes supported which can be set via classes on any link are:

##Sample Code

and when populated, this might look like:

or this:

##Versions

Note: The official Twitter retweet button is currently 19KB minified (even when optimized) so the filesizes for the above aren't too bad in comparison.

##Customization

Should you wish to further customize the button, there are two parts of the code you may wish to look at:

In the future, depending on whether this button gets widely used, multiple theming options and easier customization via -data attributes may also be added.

##Compatibility

Confirmed as working with Firefox 5-7+, Chrome 11-Canary, Safari 5+, Opera 11.5+, IE9. For some older browsers without gradient support, the buttons should work but may have have a white background (default). If you would prefer to include an image-based gradient for this, feel free to via the gitwatch class.

##Futher work

There are a number of further optimizations that are possible on the code for the GitHub Watchers button and I'm going to see just how much smaller we can get it trimmed down to. I may also try getting a button builder such as http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton together in the near future.

One thing I would like to get in is support for 'watching' a repository without the need to launch a new window or navigate to the repository directly. I believe this should be possible based on http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/watching/ and I'll work on baking this into the next version of the button.

##Credits

GitHub Watchers is a project by Addy Osmani based on the great gitfollow work by Guillermo Rauch. Some of the major changes applied to that work for this release included stripping out code that wasn't cross-browser, cleaning up the codebase, trimming down the file-size, switching to the Watchers API, adding support for multiple modes and moving towards jsHint compatability amongst others.