Star velocity, measured daily.
Afterglow reads the public star count of every repo it tracks, once a day, and keeps every reading. The numbers come back as a README badge and as a leaderboard.
What this is
GitHub restricted stargazer lists on 30 June 2026, and star history went with them. Aggregate counts are still public, so those are what we snapshot, daily, and a snapshot is never deleted.
History cannot be backfilled. Nobody can go back and observe what a star count was last Tuesday, which is what makes this the only comprehensive, cross-ecosystem accumulating series, and makes every tracked day a day nobody can catch up on.
Every number here carries its fidelity. A measured velocity comes from two readings at least half a day apart. Anything weaker is labeled and stays grey: a young repo shows its lifetime average marked ~avg, a repo on its first reading says it is still measuring. We would rather print less than print a number we would have to retract.
Put it in your README
One URL. No token, and it works for repos you do not own.
Add ?style=card for the card with its 30-day sparkline, and ?theme=dark if the README is dark. The pill is one render everywhere, the way the rest of the badge row is.
The card above follows this page's theme: a <picture> with a prefers-color-scheme source, which is what a README wants if it has to read well in both.
If your README still points at the dead star-history embed, edit the hostname and change nothing else:
https://afterglow.watch/svg?repos=mattpocock/skills&type=DateA badge request for a repo we have not seen before is what starts it being tracked. The first render says tracking has just started, and the series builds from there.
If your repo is mostly Markdown, a skills collection say, GitHub files it under whatever scripts it finds, or under nothing. *.md linguist-detectable in .gitattributes fixes the label, on your repo page and on our rankings.
Track a repo
We enroll a fixed number of repos a day. Past that a submission goes into the queue and enrolls over the next days, rather than being dropped.
The leaderboard
Every tracked repo we can measure, ranked by stars per day. A card's percentile line is checkable there: same pool, same arithmetic, same day. Open the rankings.
Opting out
If you maintain a repo and you would rather it was not here, write to hello@afterglow.watch from an address that ties you to the repo. A person checks it by hand. After that the badge reads not tracked and the repo is gone from the rankings.
Readings already taken stay in the store, because nothing is ever deleted from it. Nothing further is collected, and nothing is shown.