tools-only Awesome Claude Code - "Repo Ticker"
What is this thing?
The repo displays an animated SVG, in the style of a "stock ticker", with the names of various Claude Code projects, their authors, and some stargazer data. You might be wondering - what is it?
The ticker is populated by repositories that are returned as search results for the query claude code/claude-code by the GitHub REST API. Periodically, a repository workflow queries the API for 100 results to this query - it then takes a random sample of those results and generates the animation for the ticker. The animation can be thought of as a long-ish strip of SVG text that "scrolls" from right to left over the area of the ticker container. It also displays the star count for each repository, and a small "delta" showing its change from the previous day.
The purpose of the ticker is: (i) to provide some exposure to projects that may or may not be on the list; (ii) to add some "fun" visual flair to the repo; (iii) markdown/SVG flex. (That's just a little joke - it was all Claude's idea to begin with.) You can inspect the aforementioned workflow/scripts yourself to verify what I just described - the ticker does not constitute any endorsement or advertisement of the projects that appear on it, which as I mentioned, are selected at random. If you see anything strange or malicious on the ticker, you may notify the maintainer.
Technical Details
The "infinite scroll" effect is produced by an SVG animation that changes the horizontal coordinates of the group of SVG elements that constitute the ticker's "tape"; and in order to create a seamless, continuous scroll effect, the first few entries on the tape (enough to cover the first frame of the animation) are repeated at the end of the list of entries:
---------|-----------------------|
A B C | D E F G H A B C| <<--
---------|-----------------------|
---------|-----------------------|
F G H | A B C | <<--
---------|-----------------------|
---------|-----------------------|
A B C | | LOOP
---------|-----------------------|
So, when the duplicate elements have traversed the width of the visible window, the animation resets to the beginning, and the loop starts over.
I know that sounds kind of simple, but it's actually ridiculously clever.
SVG Text
Working with SVG text is very annnoying. First, it doesn't have any word-wrapping properties, so you have to estimate the width based on character count. Second, what looks good on one screen may be illegible on another. My initial design did not adequately account for the GitHub mobile app. The text had some glow filters and other stuff that looked kind of decent on a monitor, but is terrible on mobile. If you want the text to be legible on the GitHub mobile app, it must be crisp, sharp, and have pretty large font-size. You cannot use media-queries or anything like that (not supported by GitHub renderer). I recommend avoiding any sort of filter and keeping it pretty simple.
In order to squeeze a little bit of additional headroom from the layout, I landed on this "two-level" design so that if the text overflowed, I didn't have to worry about it bleeding over into the next entry on the ticker. I've heard people say "If it bleeds, it leads", but I don't think they were talking about the text itself. More like - "if it bleeds, it's hard to read(s)"...
Wow, good one, Claude.
For more information about the tasteful artistic design of this repo, you may consult HOW IT LOOKS.