SlickGrid – A lightening fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet. Finding a quality client-side grid tool is tough. This might just be one.

Textmate-Minimap – A minimap plugin for TextMate. So great for those overly sized source documents we all hate to admit we have.

Bundler – Gemfiles are fun. – Like it or not, this will be the de facto for managing ruby gems. Might as well embrace it.

jquery-ujs – Rails 3 has embraced unobtrusive JavaScript, and this is the official rails.js for jQuery.

quicksand – jQuery plugin. Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation. GORGEOUS!

rack-codehighlighter – Rack Middleware for code highlighting. This will power my blog’s syntax highlighting when I switch platforms to toto (see below).

ruby – The Ruby Programming Language. The official git mirror.

ruby-cisco – Cisco Library for Ruby. Remote control Cisco routers with ease.

tipsy – Facebook-style tooltips plugin for jQuery. I’m using these on almost every new project.

toto – the 10 second blog-engine for hackers. So awesome. Stay tuned for more on toto in the coming weeks.

That’s it for now!

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:

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!