ProtoMultiselect, through the magic of @github, you have grown up! Git+github = open source game changer.

Proof positive that Git and Github has changed the game when it comes to open source. I had happened upon the ProtoMultiselect code back about a year ago when we first implemented Posterous Tagging. It's an amazing little bit of JS that gives you a Mail.app / Facebook selector-like textbox. Essential.

I love autocomplete functionality, and this was one of the most complete open source autocompletes available. It was a pretty unclean codebase -- we had to do quite a bit of hacking to get it working for our tagging. (But it works!)

I hadn't thought about it until lately -- but now we're re-examining all old JS and also planning some cool functionality around address books that will require more multi-select autocomplete UI. Enter Github.


I had found thewebfellas's version of ProtoMultiselect, and from there, clicking on the Network tab, I found who else had picked up the trail, since that original repo had gone cold on March 24th. dvsandersluis picked it up... between March 24th and now, an amazing array of cleanups and fixes had gotten into this codebase. I was astonished at how much had changed between the hacky code snippet off an outdated blog post from last year to the clean, up-to-date version of today.

I forked off dvandersluis and added my own bit (a piece that we need to properly support tagging) --

And now I've also submitted back to the tree in the form of my own fork. I needed something, the codebase didn't do it, and I added it.

Code is living. It's how open source was meant to be. Github, you rock.
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Yep - i think the joy of github is that it fits in with the way a lot of us work - i.e. we pickup some code and run with it for a while until it does what we need from it, but then other things come along and it may fall by the wayside. Github let's other people then pick it up and keep the momentum going - i think it's pretty amazing. I'll also check out your latest fork - i must admit it's been ticking along nicely in the app we used it in - i always meant to come back to it (can't believe it's been 9 months!!)
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