Weekly post (1/9)

• How to subscribe to new releases of open-source projects on GitHub.

  GitHub’s all-or-nothing way of subscribing to a repo is annoying. You can either be:

  • notified when when participating or @mentioned.
  • notified of all conversations
  • not notified at all.

  

  There’s no option for more fine-grained controls, such as just subscribing to new releases, which is what I need.

  I found a makeshift solution today, via the use of an Atom feed on the releases page of a repo. This page is reached by appending /releases to the end of a repo’s URL. For example, for React’s repo at https://github.com/facebook/react, the releases page is at https://github.com/facebook/react/releases and contains a feed called “release notes from react” at https://github.com/facebook/buck/release.atom. Add this feed to your news reader app (I personally use Reeder) and you’ll be notified of each release. Right now I’m subscribed to fast-moving projects that I use heavily: React, TypeScript and Webpack.