Have you curated your GitHub topic for your product?

Have you curated your GitHub topic for your product?

On GitHub, topics are used in the Explore section of the site. Topics can be used by developers in your community to "tag" their repositories – and it's very likely if you have any ecosystem at all, people have added a topic for your product (they just get automatically created so whatever the most popular one is wins in the autocomplete).

Do you notice how some topics have logos and descriptions? This is called "curating" a topic.

How it works

When you have a repo in GitHub, you can specify topics in the settings dialog:

These topics become clickable in the GitHub repository overview:

And when you click on a topic, it shows you all the public repositories that use that topic:

This header is what can be curated by you. Notice how this has a link to the repository that describes the topic plus an outgoing link to its website. The top can also be Markdown with links (and utm tags!).

If you don't curate a topic for your product, you get this:

On the right side you'll see a link to curate the topic by following the contribution instructions.

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Note: GitHub specifically asks maintainers and owners to not curate their own topics to avoid conflicts of interest. It would be best to encourage your community to contribute instead of someone from your company.

You may also want to watch the topics for new repositories to spotlight in your community.

I have no statistics on how many people click topics to explore but I bet it's a non-zero amount. I even spend nearly an entire module in my Contributing to Open Source course on ways to find projects through the Explore section.

This is like those tasting stands at the grocery store. The ones you make a beeline to for free morsels and ignore who makes it. But you might as well get a brand impression where you can 😉

Have a lovely day,
Kamran

Want devs to love your product?

Hi 👋 I'm Kamran. I'm a consulting developer educator who can help your DevRel team increase adoption with better docs, samples, and courseware.
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