I'll second that. Having only ever used private CVS before in my life, I've never published anything open source ever. In fact, after hearing everything I have about Git, I went ahead and purchased the $7 plan so that I could give it a try, but without having to share anything publicly.
That said, as soon as I started checking code in, I ended up creating 2 (very small) projects and sharing them publicly, as they weren't anything close to even remotely core to the other product that I'm building (that I bought github for), and it seemed silly to use up 2 of my private projects on such trivial applications.
This is exactly the behavior that Github encourages, and as someone who hasn't contributed to open source in a very long time, it was interesting to see how quickly Github re-converted me.
I just pushed them last week, and they're what I'd call 'entry-level-code' at best, so no. I honestly don't expect them too, but if someone were googling for 'tornado webserver administration', they might find my code, and it might be useful. Beyond that, I don't really have much greater expectation.
Edit: http://github.com/bmelton is the location of the projects. There are currently 2 up there, both in a very fledgeling state:
http://github.com/bmelton/Braveicon is a simple favicon library that will accept a URL as a parameter and find the favicon for a given url. The URL can be fully qualified ('http://news.ycombinator.com) or loose (news.ycombinator.com), and braveicon will step through all of the W3C valid means of specifying a favicon and return the URL.
http://github.com/bmelton/Twister is a server administration framework for starting / restarting tornado web server instances. Since Tornado is typically managed by your app, the app must be (very slightly) modified, but this reduces having to 'ps -ef | grep [myscriptname]' multiple times to kill your app, and gives you 'twister.py restart' instead.
You might want to edit that comment to link to your project since the comment will probably now rank higher than your repo for that hypothetical Google user.
That said, as soon as I started checking code in, I ended up creating 2 (very small) projects and sharing them publicly, as they weren't anything close to even remotely core to the other product that I'm building (that I bought github for), and it seemed silly to use up 2 of my private projects on such trivial applications.
This is exactly the behavior that Github encourages, and as someone who hasn't contributed to open source in a very long time, it was interesting to see how quickly Github re-converted me.